The Villa and the Vortex: Supernatural Stories (1916-1924), Elinor Mordaunt, edited by Melissa Edmundson (Handheld Press, 2021).
Melissa Edmundson’s Women’s Weird anthologies were, for me, an invaluable window into the work of a number of long-neglected women writers and a trove of weird, unsettling short fiction of astonishing breadth. Stories like the cosmic horror of Francis Stevens’ ‘Unseen – Unfeared’, or the deeply oneiric tragedy of ‘The House’ by Katherine Mansfield, demonstrated that women writers are not just the equal of their male counterparts but, often, far exceed them. We should be thankful, then, that Edmundson has continued her partnership with Handheld Press to begin a series of single-author collections, starting with The Villa and the Vortex, a retrospective of Elinor Mordaunt’s strange, melancholy tales. Read more
