Review: Ladies of Fantasy

English, Seon Manley & Gogo Lewis (Eds.) Ladies of Fantasy – Two Centuries of Sinister Stories by the Gentle Sex, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., New York, NY, USA, 1975

Octavo; hardcover; 214pp., Light spotting to text block edges; previous owner’s ink inscription on front free endpaper; dustjacket (designed by Edward Gorey) sunned along the spine and top edges and mildly foxed, but now protected by non-adhesive plastic

This is one of a series of collections compiled by Seon Manley and Gogo Lewis, focussing on the writing talents of women authors since the Nineteenth Century. It caught my eye mainly due to the Edward Gorey dustjacket; but once inside, there are more treasures to be discovered.

For many years, women have found – in the face of changed and straitened circumstances or for want of any other opportunities – avenues of employment in the writing sphere. In Australia, during the 1930s, many women turned to writing and publishing to bring in money and to gain the satisfaction of employment, and thus we have such literary giants as Eleanor Dark, May Gibbs, Nuri Mass, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, Ruth Park, Ethel Turner and Dorothy Wall. Similar booms occurred in journalism across the globe, as periodicals defined select readerships and the ‘woman’s perspective’ became a valid viewpoint from which to conjure reportage. Like most writers these working authors turned their hands to many styles and forms of writing and no few of them took on the ‘weird tale’ as a salient exercise.

Most of the women represented in this volume are either British or American and had trans-Atlantic upbringings; the two exceptions are Madame Blavatsky and Grazia Deledda, They represent a wide range of social opportunity from the idly rich to the working professional. All the stories presented are top notch, covering a wide range of sub-genres from hard sci-fi to the gothic romance. All are suitably creepy.

I was eager to read the Blavatsky piece – “The Ensouled Violin”. People say Lovecraft is fond of adjectives! Wow! La Blavatsky’s writing creates an aubergine haze over the pages! The story – about a violin virtuoso who uses his mentor’s intestines to string his Stradivarius in a devilish pact with the Powers of Evil – is suitably gruesome. Still, I have to admit that the purple prose tended to kill the effect, and the Gothic Novel pacing drew out the action far too much: a shorter snappier style would have made for a better tale. There’s a nice comparison to be drawn between this story and HPL’s “The Music of Erich Zann”: mad musicians and their devilish instruments...

Grazia Deledda was Italian and based in Sardinia. Her writings tend to focus upon her home region and in 1926, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was elected to the Italian Academy. The story presented here (“The Sorcerer”), too, is based amongst the Italian peasantry and deals with a local ‘cunning man’s’ curse placed on the wife of a man who disdains his magical prowess. The farmer’s wife is prevented from giving birth by the curse, and he must approach the sorcerer to beg him to remove the enchantment. Of all the stories here, this is the one that had the best (to my mind) twist and the most satisfying resolution.

Other notables in the collection are Edith Nesbit’s “The Pavilion” has a core of sand-dry humour, lightly spritzed with acid; Joan Aiken’s “Searching for Summer”, a convincing peek at a future world wherein bomb technologies used in a great conflict have left the planet enshrouded, making moments of sunshine sporadic and rare; and Grena J. Bennett’s “The Tilting Island”, a thoroughly convincing tale of the island of Manhattan sliding into the ocean due to the subsidence of subterranean strata from the weight of the city above. Her journalist’s background serves her well in this tale and it reads like an eyewitness account: I have to admit that the style is a bit clunky in places, but recent disastrous events in New York – Hurricane Sandy; 9/11 – make her observations leap right off the page.

On balance (and I admit that this is a generalisation) women writers are better observers of the social milieu, especially those working in the early Twentieth Century or earlier. What makes these pieces exceptional is their attention to the details of lives and interpersonal relationships. In horror fiction, or the weird tale, this level of observation is crucial; as M.R. James said about this genre:

“[Ghosts should be] malevolent or odious; [their victims should be] introduced in a placid way, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings, and in this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head.”

These writers are experts at the creation of these sorts of “calm environments”; not less so their ability to manufacture “ominous things” and to let them emerge into focus. I certainly intend to keep an eye out for the other titles in this series, especially Ladies of Horror – Two Centuries of Supernatural Stories by the Gentle Sex.

Three-and-a-half tentacled horrors.