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.
In her excellent introduction, Edmundson paints a picture of Mordaunt as a remarkable woman of great courage and drive but one whose life – described with some amount of understatement as “eventful” – was marred by misfortune and a deep sense of restless unease. Born Evelyn May Clowes in 1872, the persona of Elinor Mordaunt would develop as Clowes struggled through a series of troubled relationships and then discovered solace in travel; she moved to Australia in 1903, pregnant with her son, and, later in life, undertook a commission to document a month’s sea travel between Marseilles and Tahiti, a journey which extended to take in New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Kenya. The strong impression forms that had she been a man, she would’ve been hailed as an author-pioneer in a similar vein to Algernon Blackwood (to whom, admittedly, she was favourably compared in her time). As it stands, her work is now largely forgotten. This is no doubt largely simply due to her being a woman, but it is also, perhaps, a symptom of her better writing: it is not just weird or eerie, occasionally even horrific, but also deeply and gnawingly sorrowful. Mordaunt was a gifted artist in many arenas beyond her writing and had a full, if not always happy, life, but she could never be described as settled, and her travels sometimes seem to be a way of fleeing from more than journeying towards. Indeed, Mordaunt admits in her own autobiography Sinabada that ‘I seemed indeed to be forever battling in a sea with a strong undertow’. A sense of being pulled by invisible forces, helpless and insignificant, pervades Mordaunt’s writing.
This is perhaps most evident in ‘Luz’, where our unnamed narrator becomes lost in a ‘thin yellow fog’ – one of London’s notorious pea-souper smogs – and is drawn through the city streets by a blind man with sinister designs. The descriptions of being lost in a once-familiar setting quickly accrue the feeling of being swept along by a rushing river – ‘Sharp, jutting angles of wall and railing shot out before me. There was no accounting for them; avoiding one, I turned a corner and there was another like a sharp elbow’ – and summon up the same emotions of ‘self-pity, exasperation, fatigue’ that must accompany such an experience. This is only intensified by the cloying, smothering attentions of her erstwhile guide who, ultimately, leads her to his dismal lodgings. Here he quotes Milton and Greek tragedies while obliquely outlining a strange, alchemical plan he has for her. As her abductor-guide becomes more eloquent and enthused, the narrator’s voice collapses until she is reduced to gasping out broken words – ‘If only — you — would — would — light the gas — a candle — anything — I promise —’ and the sense of claustrophobic, helpless terror becomes increasingly palpable.
This theme of being prey to indifferent forces surfaces again in ‘The Country-side’ and ‘The Fountain’ where, once again, women are entrapped by men. In ‘The Country-side’, Margaret Wister is ignored and belittled by her increasingly boorish and unfaithful husband until she turns to the equally ostracised figure of Mother Orpin, the local cunning-woman, for assistance. Sylvia Colquhoun, drained of life and vibrancy by another indolent husband, eventually becomes one with her beloved, eponymous fountain, then returns to linger in a house now filled with ‘an awful dank chilliness’.
For me, however, the masterpiece of this collection, a book which contains many excellent tales, is ‘The Weakening Point’. Here we find Bond Challice, a young man this time, trapped by both the expectations of his proud family and nightmares that repeat every birthday. These nightmares summon up visions of a ‘monster at the end of a long vista of brilliantly lighted rooms, but each year the number of rooms which lay between them became one less’, and Challice quickly realises that each room stands for a year of his dwindling life. Mordaunt’s power in telling this rather simple tale lies in how she paints Challice as a pitiable but not necessarily sympathetic character; he is, perhaps understandably, sullen and unpleasant to Patterson, his sole friend, whilst simultaneously demanding of the quiet and well-meaning man’s time and money. Even despite this, though, Challice’s desperation and terror as the dream-figure moves closer and closer becomes ever more intense, cracking through his mask of class and wealth. Ultimately, Challice confides in Patterson that in the days before his birthday, knowing that the coming nightmare will bring the creature yet closer, he gets ‘the fidgets’. He then continues: ‘It’s a sort of sweating hell. It pricks out in pins and needles all over the back of one’s hands, and up one’s arms. It makes one feel as if one had no inside’. I gasped at this final line, in a way few pieces of writing have made me, and it was a gasp of recognition. Although bound up in the form of a supernatural tale, ‘The Weakening Point’ is a deeply honest and unflinching portrayal of chronic anxiety: the selfishness and self-loathing; the need to be both accepted and abandoned; the loathing but also longing for the worst to finally happen. The feeling of having no inside, of your soul falling away into the abyss. It is not a horror story in any simplistic sense but it is one of the most horrifying stories I have ever read. A masterfully, timeless work that I find deeply, personally chilling.
The Villa and The Vortex is not without its flaws. The concept behind ‘The Vortex’, for example, is intriguing but its execution means we know what will happen almost from the start. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as dread caused by foreknowledge can be as effective as fright caused by the unexpected but Mordaunt’s tendency to elongate what should perhaps be a shorter tale defuses some of that dread. Equally, ‘The Landlady’’s depiction of an un-ghost eventually comes across as a bit twee for my more cynical tastes. Modern readers may also find Mordaunt’s occasionally breathless dialogue excessive. When it works, as in the aforementioned ‘Luz’, it adds a giddy velocity to her tales but sometimes, as in ‘The Villa’ when a magical circle is broken by a cry of ‘You sillies! You sillies!’, it can be jarring.
Yet, overall, these are minor and largely personal quibbles. The Villa and The Vortex is another excellent edition from Handheld with Edmunson’s always-engaging and enthusiastic editorial work beautifully presented in the press’s striking and elegant style. The cover art, ‘Klingsor’s Castle’ by Hermann Hendrich, absolutely drips with the sense of stifling despair that often pervades Mordaunt’s writing and Kate MacDonald’s glossary usefully explains some of Mordaunt’s period idiom.
If you open this book looking for a simple, obvious horror tale – what even Lovecraft derided as ‘secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains’ – or even the weirder terrors of tentacular monstrosities and gaping voids then you will walk away disappointed. If, however, you are looking for the more human horror of loss and despair – the paper-thin line between life, death and something fundamentally less than either – then here is a book in which to wander.
You can find Elinor Mordaunt’s The Villa and the Vortex: Supernatural Stories (1916-1924) on Handheld Press‘s website or at Amazon (ad):
Review by: Daniel Pietersen, who is the editor of I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales Of R Murray Gilchrist, part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, and also a regular guest lecturer for the Romancing The Gothic project. He covers gothic and weird horror, both fiction and non-fiction, for publications like Dead Reckonings, Revenant and Horrified. Daniel lives in Edinburgh with his wife, dog and a surprising amount of skulls. He has also reviewed D. K. Broster’s From the Abyss (also from Handheld Press) for Horror Homeroom.
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