Women's Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 (Handheld W...

For fans of H.P. Lovecraft and Mary Shelley, female writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century embrace the supernatural, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and the Gothic in Women’s Weird. Edited by literary historian Melissa Edmundson, Women’s Weird features the best classic Weird short stories that showcase how these authors moved beyond the traditional ghost story and into areas of Weird fiction and dark fantasy. A haunted house, some very haunted gloves, a love that will never die—these are examples of the classic gothic settings reimagined by these turn of the century authors. Authors include Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The Giant Wistaria”), Edith Nesbit (“The Shadow”), Edith Wharton (“Kerfol”), May Sinclair (‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched”), Mary Butts (“With and Without Buttons”), and D K Broster (“Crouching At The Door”).Featuring stories that explore beyond the primarily domestic concerns of earlier supernatural fiction, Women’s Weird is sure to thrill new readers and delight these authors’ fans.

The Washington Post"The collection is a deliberate effort to attenuate, in the horror tradition, the dominance of men like M R James, Arthur Machen, H P Lovecraft and Ambrose Bierce, and restore to prominence innovative writers such as May Sinclair, Mary Butts and Margery Lawrence. They show the continuing influence of Gothic and supernatural tropes and the effect of their collision with a modernizing world and women’s changing roles within it."

"Handheld Books…publish[es] tempting, macabre treats.”

The Gothic Library"A landmark anthology … Edmundson has curated a solid journey through weird landscapes … The notes/annotations at the back of the book by publisher Kate Macdonald should become an industry standard … This is an unmissable, urgent and era-defining work."

“Couching at the Door” was perhaps my favorite story in the collection, and its exploration of the relationship between art and morality as well as the story of a hedonistic older man leading a beautiful young protege into depravity"

About the Author

Melissa Edmundson is Lecturer in British Literature at Clemson University and specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British women writers, with a particular interest in women’s supernatural fiction. She is the editor of a critical edition of Alice Perrin’s East of Suez (1901, 2011), and author of Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013) and Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire (2018). Her other work includes essays on the First World War ghost stories of H D Everett and haunted objects in the supernatural fiction of Margery Lawrence, as well as a chapter on women writers and ghost stories for The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story. She has edited Avenging Angels: Ghost Stories by Victorian Women Writers (2018). Her Handheld Press titles include Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 (2019), Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937 (2020), and Elinor Mordaunt's The Villa and the Vortex (2021).

Reviews

News