The Outcast and The Rite: Stories of Landscape and Fear, 1925-38 (Handheld Weirds, 5)

The Australian novelist and playwright Helen de Guerry Simpson (1897-1940) published many supernatural short stories. This new edition selects the best of her unsettling writing, adding some little-known stories to her 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric (1925). Featured stories include:

• ‘An Experiment of the Dead’, in which a visitor comes to visit a woman in the condemned cell.
• ‘Good Company’, in which a traveller in Italy becomes temporarily possessed of a hitchhiker in her mind.
• ‘Grey Sand and White Sand’ is the horrifying story of a landscape artist who sees and paints a different view.
• ‘The Outcast’, in which a soldier left for dead in the War takes his revenge on his village.
• ‘The Rite’, in which a discontented woman enters a wood, and emerges transformed.

The Introduction is by Melissa Edmundson, the leading scholar of women’s Weird fiction and supernatural writing from the early 20th century. -- Publisher

Helen de Guerry Simpson was born in Sydney, New South Wales in 1897. In 1914, she travelled to France and the UK to continue her studies, and read French at the University of Oxford from 1916 to 1917. In 1918, she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service as a senior section officer specializing in decoding. In 1919, Simpson returned to Oxford to study music and eventually founded the Oxford Women’s Dramatic Society, as well as publishing several plays. Her studies ended in 1921 when she broke university regulations which prohibited male and female students from acting together. In 1927, she married the surgeon Sir Denis John Browne. Her first novel, Acquittal, was published in 1925. One of her most successful works, Boomerang, an historical fiction novel, was published in 1932 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Another novel, Under Capricorn (1937) was adapted into a 1949 British thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She died in 1940.

Melissa Edmundson is Lecturer in British Literature at Clemson University, South Carolina. She 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 Handheld Press titles include Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940 (2019) and Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891–1937 (2020).