By Melissa Edmundson
‘I seem to have lived so many lives, died so many deaths; been in so many different countries, among such diverse people, becoming for the time being part of themselves, that there are times when I feel like a disembodied spirit; just floating about seeing and not being seen.’
— Elinor Mordaunt, Sinabada
Elinor Mordaunt lived an eventful life, a life that would have fitted well into the plot of one of her many novels. She was an independent, free-spirited woman, travelling the world, and visiting North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. She lost a fiancé early in life, escaped from one abusive husband, separated from another, and raised a son entirely on her own. She survived malaria, the zeppelin attacks on London during the First World War, and the 1918–19 Spanish flu. Amidst this life of adventure, Mordaunt was constantly gathering material for her writing. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the early 1940s she published bestselling novels with leading London publishing houses, as well as collections of short fiction, travel literature, works for children, and numerous pieces for magazines and newspapers. Her writing was compared by reviewers to that of Algernon Blackwood, H G Wells, and Joseph Conrad, and her work was reviewed favourably alongside publications by Blackwood and James Joyce. Both Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield reviewed her work.
Throughout her career as a professional writer, Mordaunt also excelled at the supernatural story. From her earliest published collection in 1914, she included supernatural and weird themes, and each collection that followed incorporated at least one strange tale. Many of these stories involve Mordaunt’s fascination with the sea and sailing, while others concern themselves with life in the back streets and alleyways of London. Her characters likewise come from all walks of life and reflect Mordaunt’s lifelong interest in and observation of people. Across her work, no two of her strange tales are alike. There are non-supernatural stories of obsession and revenge that lean towards the Gothic and Weird, while a few stories could now be described as science fiction. In these collections, there are inventive reimaginings of haunted houses, ‘ghosts’ of people not yet dead, prehistoric beings, monsters that inhabit dreams, witches that come straight out of a folk horror tradition, mermaids, cursed plays, and deranged scientists.
Elinor Mordaunt is responsible for an eclectic and wide-ranging output of supernatural fiction that rivals the best writing by her contemporaries. Yet in the decades following her death in 1942, Mordaunt was neglected and largely forgotten as an author, her work omitted from the subsequent anthologies that helped to ensure the reputations of fellow writers. Her otherworldly creations have lost none of their potency and still have the power to shock, to impress us with their originality and inventiveness. This major voice within the supernatural genre has been neglected for far too long, and it is time that her work returned to a wider audience.
Life and works
Elinor Mordaunt was born Evelyn May Clowes on 7 May 1872 at Cotgrave, near Nottingham, to St John Legh Clowes and Elizabeth Caroline Bingham Clowes, and had six brothers and a sister. The family moved to Charlton Park, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, when she was five and later lived in Oxfordshire. Mordaunt was allowed a great deal of freedom in her youth and said in her autobiography that ‘there was certainly nothing Victorian about my upbringing’ (Mordaunt 1938, 29). She described her early education as ‘perfectly futile’ (35), as the family changed governesses quite often and with each new one her education seemed to start over again. She remembered that Cassell’s threepenny book series of classic works was a revelation in her self-education, and she constantly carried one in her pocket. Her mother would read Thomas Hardy’s novels aloud to the family, and she would enact Shakespeare plays with her friends. When she was around eighteen, Mordaunt’s family sent her to London for a couple of months to study painting, but she was happy to return to the country, riding horses and spending time outdoors.
In her twenties, Mordaunt began a courtship with William Banks Wright, who made his money in South Africa by farming and speculating in gold. She accepted his proposal of marriage, and intended to return to South Africa with him, but the marriage was delayed because of her father’s stroke, and Wright departed without her, planning to return to Britain in six months. He died suddenly of fever while leading an expedition along the Zambezi River near Bulawayo.
Around 1897, still mourning the loss of Wright, Mordaunt went to Mauritius with a cousin’s family and shortly after married Maurice Wiehe, a sugar planter. The marriage was unhappy from the beginning, and Mordaunt states in her autobiography that Wiehe only married her with the idea of obtaining some professional position by connecting himself to her family. At one point, he even offered her ‘as a stake’ when playing cards (76). The marriage resulted in two stillborn children, but Mordaunt said, ‘One effect it had upon me was that it started me writing’ (74). Suffering from malaria and pregnant once again, Mordaunt left Mauritius – and her husband – two and a half years later. She spent three months at her family’s home in England but, still desperate for a change and feeling miserable and depressed, decided to sail for Australia. She recalled, ‘One might have thought my life had ended in the mid-twenties. Nothing of the sort, it was beginning again, but upon a completely different plane. I was at last getting hold of it and knew what I wanted’ (80).
Shortly after arriving in Melbourne in 1903, with £30 to her name, Mordaunt gave birth to her son, Godfrey Weston Wiehe. Taking advantage of the gift she had for drawing and painting, she sewed blouses and cushions, painted fabrics, parasols, and advertisements and eventually ran a small embroidery design business. She said, ‘I remember everything by line and colour, the curve of a road, the fine lines of a person’s face, the expression etched upon it when this or that was said. […] I gather it all up and use it in my stories’ (40, 41).
She took an editorial post at a woman’s monthly magazine at £2 a week, which made it possible for her to move out of her two-room residence in Melbourne and into a small cottage outside the city. She wrote articles on cooking, managed the advice columns, and wrote short stories, but was later fired with only a week’s notice because the printers could not read her writing. Luckily, Mordaunt’s first book, The Garden of Contentment (1902), a series of fictional letters written from England which she began while living in Mauritius, was receiving good reviews, and Charles Bogue Luffman, the principal of Burnley College (a horticultural school in Melbourne) put her in touch with a man who wanted to redesign his garden, agreeing to pay her £200 to complete the project.
She then accepted an offer from Luffman to live with him and supervise the female students at the college. Mordaunt valued his friendship, but he began to be possessive and, as Mordaunt was uninterested in a romantic relationship, the two parted ways. She left the college with five shillings and returned to rented rooms and her painting and home design work. She eventually took commissions for several design projects. Her health was constantly bad, however, and after her fourth trip to the hospital, her friends urged her to travel back to England.
In 1908, Mordaunt returned to England and lived for a short time at her parents’ home while making money selling short stories to magazines and writing children’s stories under the name ‘John Heron’. Shortly after her arrival, Rosemary: That’s for Remembrance (1909) was published in Melbourne and London, and her first travel book On the Wallaby through Victoria (1911), writing as ‘E M Clowes’, was published by William Heinemann. During this time she also began writing fairy tales, and an illustrated collection of fairy stories for children, Shoe and Stocking Stories, was published in 1915. She moved to London after being hired by the weekly paper Black and White and worked there until it ceased publication in 1912.
Luckily for Mordaunt, her publishing career was about to take off. A Ship of Solace (1911), based on her journey from Britain to Australia, was accepted by William Heinemann, who told Mordaunt upon their first meeting, ‘You’ve got genius’ (147). Heinemann paid her £30 for the novel, which enabled her to open a bank account. She published several books with Heinemann, and used her newfound success to reinvent herself, legally changing her name to ‘Evelyn May Mordaunt’.
By 1933 Mordaunt had published books with Heinemann, Cassell, Methuen, Hutchinson, Martin Secker and Michael Joseph. Her novel Mrs Van Kleek, published by Secker in 1933, was later adapted into a play. With this success and financial stability, Mordaunt moved to Greenwich, and around 1920 to St John’s Wood. After her son had finished college and moved to Kenya Mordaunt was dreading another English winter which would wreak havoc on her health. In 1923 she approached the foreign editor at the Daily News with a plan to sail from Marseilles to Tahiti, over the course of a month, on cargo ships and sailing boats. The paper agreed to pay for a series of articles, at £20 each, related to her travels. From Marseilles, she traveled to Martinique, Guadeloupe, through the Panama Canal, and on to Tahiti. She declared, ‘I loved the life at Tahiti. I know it is mostly spoilt by dissolute and idle white people, but one can keep clear of them’ (237). From Tahiti, she sailed to the Samoan Islands and on to Fiji, New Zealand, Brisbane, and then on to Papua New Guinea where she stayed for a few months. There she was proclaimed ‘Sinabada’, meaning ‘Lady King’, and only after her departure did she discover an article written in a French paper saying that she ‘was the only woman ever known to have reigned as monarch over sixty cannibal islands’ (262). Mordaunt eventually described these travels in The Venture Book and The Further Venture Book, both published in 1926. After returning to Brisbane, she booked passage on a Dutch cargo boat headed to Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies). From there, the trip took her to Bali, Java, Sumatra, Ceylon, Bombay, and then to Kenya to visit her son, now married. More years of travel in the Americas followed.
In 1931 Mordaunt’s novel Gin and Bitters was published pseudonymously by ‘A Riposte’ with the subtitle ‘A Novel about a Novelist who writes Novels about other Novelists’. It was a satirical response to Somerset Maugham’s best-selling roman à clef Cakes and Ale (1930), whose two main characters many read as unflattering representations of Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. Mordaunt was close friends with Florence Dugdale Hardy and most likely wrote her satire out of retaliation for Maugham’s portrayal of the recently deceased Hardy. Her book caused a scandal when Maugham discovered who had written it and that it was to be published in the UK by Martin Secker under the title Full Circle. Maugham sued Mordaunt for libel and Secker was forced to withdraw the book from publication and destroy the remaining stock before the case reached court. 1
Mordaunt was happiest when traveling, and her personal demons always seemed to resurface when she returned to England. She wrote in her autobiography of feeling unsettled at this point in her life, saying, ‘I seemed indeed to be forever battling in a sea with a strong underpull’ (346). One adverse effect of traveling so much meant that ‘though I had friends all over the world, I had no great or intimate friends; too many people had died, and I had nothing and nobody to tie me anywhere’ (346–47). She remarked ‘It is, indeed, evident that from the very first the fates planned for me to walk alone and to possess nothing that I have not earned; and once in possession they snatch what I have away from me as quickly as possible’ (Mordaunt 1938, 347).
After being separated from her husband for over thirty years, Mordaunt advertised for information about him. Hearing nothing, she presumed he was dead, and assumed that she was free to remarry. 2 In 1933, she married Robert Rawnsley Bowles (1865–1947), and in late 1933 the couple sailed from England to Sydney. Mordaunt devoted only a few lines to this relationship in her autobiography, cryptically saying, ‘Later on I did, ridiculously enough, fall really in love and married a man several years older than myself, but it began and ended in tragedy’ (347). On her arrival at San Pedro, California, in December 1936, Mordaunt is recorded as a widow on the passenger lists.
During the late 1930s, Mordaunt resided in Chelsea, London, and her final years continued to be productive despite lingering health problems. She died at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, on 25 June 1942.
The art of the short story
Elinor Mordaunt was dedicated to the short story form and consistently published short fiction collections amongst her novels. The first, The Island (1914), was based on her time on Mauritius. This was followed by Before Midnight (1917), Old Wine in New Bottles (1919), Short Shipments (1922), People, Houses & Ships (1924), And Then–?: Tales of Land and Sea (1927), Traveller’s Pack (1933), and Death It Is and Other Stories (1939). The Tales of Elinor Mordaunt (1934) contains thirty-eight of her stories drawn from previous collections.
To her, these stories represented an important part of her output as a writer, and she found the writing process both frustrating and therapeutic. In Sinabada, she remarked:
one unalterably good point in writing books and stories […] is that one can look back upon one’s own silly life, which falls in blocks of years like the slices of a cut cake, almost as dispassionately as one looks back upon one’s last novel. Almost I say, for there is an inmost core of oneself so deeply wounded by it all that one dare not so much as touch it with a thought; the only way is to live on the top of things. (347–48)
In ‘How to Write Short Stories’, published in 1924, Mordaunt, writing from personal experience, declared that ‘melancholy alone breeds good work. Nobody can express big things until they have gone through soul-stirring experiences’. In the article, she also repeated what to her was an integral part of the creative process: that good writing must come from within the author’s own experiences. She said, ‘I have given up the idea that you have to wait for inspiration. Some of the stories I write have been simmering in my mind for many years before they find expression’ (Mordaunt 1924, 13). When asked how to write a short story, she stressed the importance of discipline and advised, ‘You should write your stories without ceasing if you want to succeed, sparing nothing in the way of trouble, grudging nothing in the way of serious mental outlay’ (Mordaunt 1924). Writing was a way of life, but it was also serious and time-consuming work.
Her work was consistently mentioned in major periodicals of the time and received mostly positive reviews. Given this literary fame which she sustained through a forty-year career, it is perplexing to consider how and why her work is now virtually forgotten. In his article, ‘How Not to Write Novels’ for the Derby Daily Telegraph on 26 October 1929, W Pett Ridge listed some common pitfalls in fiction writing, and praised Mordaunt, along with John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, and W B Maxwell for their ability to write about ordinary, everyday characters. R Brimley Johnson in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) (1920) commended the ‘severe aloofness and grim humour’ of Mordaunt’s writing, as well as her ability to draw distinct characters (Johnson 1920, 47). As a ‘dissector of souls’, she ‘has a cool, penetrating, gift for emotional analysis and a dramatic instinct for composition’ (59). Johnson compared Mordaunt’s work in her own time to that of the Brontë sisters: ‘Like them, she is not quite in line with the main developments of her age. She, too, has in her a certain violence of phrase and thought, an almost savage intensity that approaches the melodramatic’ (59–60). Yet when discussing her Before Midnight (1914), Johnson regressed to the regrettable opinion that Mordaunt was not ‘very successful in the short story where, indeed, women have seldom excelled’ (57). As dismissive as this statement is, it gives readers a clue as to why Mordaunt’s work is so underrepresented in discussions of short fiction from the early twentieth century: women’s writing just didn’t matter for many critics, especially in Mordaunt’s time, but also in the decades following her death. Additionally, some reviewers did not know what to do with Mordaunt’s writing. It was either too melodramatic or too unflinching.
However, her supernatural stories were favourably compared to the work of Algernon Blackwood and H G Wells, who were then considered two of the masters of the Weird tale. Punch’s review of Before Midnight noted the ‘psychic (though not always ghostly) character’ of the stories, which on the whole are ‘original and impressive’ (Anon, Punch 1917) and concluded that ‘all lovers of the occult’ will find the collection worthwhile reading. Indeed, Before Midnight is one of Mordaunt’s most supernaturally-themed collections, including ‘The Weakening Point’ and ‘The Country-side,’ along with ‘Pan’, ‘The Vision’, and ‘Parentage’. The Illustrated London News highlighted how the stories departed from the more realistic themes in her earlier novels, saying that Mordaunt ‘lean[ed] towards the mystical and the occult’ to excellent effect in the collection (Anon, Illustrated London News 1917). The New Statesman review drew particular attention to ‘The Country-side,’ calling it ‘a really terrifying study in modern witchcraft’, and remarking that the story’s ‘combination of every-day things with the things of occult and ancient horror is in a high degree effective’. The reviewer concluded by saying that the ‘collection stands head-and-shoulders above most volumes of short stories’ (Anon, New Statesman 1917).
Reviews for later collections also tended to highlight her supernatural stories. For instance, Edwin Muir’s review of People, Houses & Ships for The Nation & The Athenaeum noted ‘Her best stories are those about houses’ and singled out ‘Four Wallpapers’, ‘in which the horror is not laid on, but is part of the scheme’ (Muir 1924). The Bookman’s review of Short Shipments specifically mentioned the ‘eerie beauty’ of ‘The Fountain’ and the ‘weird history’ of ‘Hodge’, concluding, ‘All who can appreciate good writing will find great pleasure in this book’ (Anon, Bookman 1922). H C Harwood’s review in the Outlook likewise called attention to ‘Hodge,’ remarking, ‘It is in the shocker that her success is most evident’ (Harwood 1922). The Spectator called ‘Hodge’ ‘the most horrifying’ story in the collection before declaring that ‘People with strong nerves may pass an exciting couple of hours over the volume’ (Anon, Spectator 1922, 533).
W L Courtney, writing for the Daily Telegraph, proclaimed that the stories in Before Midnight were ‘so good that I can think of no better compliment than to say that they are worthy to be read side by side with Mr Blackwood’s’ (Courtney 1917). CS Evans echoed Courtney and other reviewers in recognizing Mordaunt’s ability to draw sympathetic, human characters:
[The other stories in Before Midnight] are all more than usually interesting, because they approach the subject from the human side. Miss Mordaunt’s people are breathing human folk, even those most sensitive people who experience the lure of the unknown, and not merely abstractions created to carry out an idea. (Evans 1917)
The Saturday Review was even more complimentary: ‘She challenges Mr Wells in the laboratory, Mr Burke in Limehouse, Mr Conrad at sea’ (Anon, Saturday Review 1922, 422).
Other reviews focused on Mordaunt’s ability to vary her subject matter, the vigorous quality of her writing, and her ability to hold a reader’s attention. The review of And Then–? in the Bookman applauded her ‘relentless grasp of human nature in its fundamental weakness and strength’ (Anon, Bookman 1928). This ‘relentless’, at times fatalistic, quality in Mordaunt’s writing is remarked upon in several reviews, with the reviewers ultimately finding her hard-edged style appealing. In August 1914, the Bookman reviewed The Island alongside James Joyce’s Dubliners, and commended Mordaunt for a ‘very powerful’ collection, saying of the stories, ‘If they were less powerful they might be much more pleasant to read, but then they would have failed of their purpose’ (Pugh 1914). There is indeed a relentless bleakness to Mordaunt’s supernatural fiction that blends perfectly with the supernatural entities that appear in the pages of these collections.
The stories
Although she remained doubtful about the existence of an afterlife, Mordaunt occasionally mentioned in her autobiography her encounters with the supernatural. These include the premonitions she had throughout her life and the ghostly tales and local legends that were told to her as a child. One particular story was about witches’ charms and how to use snails to heal warts, something she would later incorporate into her own tale of witchcraft, ‘The Country-side.’ During her time in Papua New Guinea, she recalled seeing a Napoleonic sailor cross a path in front of her, ‘the only authentic ghost of my life’ (Mordaunt 1938, 285). Mordaunt’s short stories showcase a variety of otherworldly, supernatural entities as she drew inspiration from folklore, myth, legend, and history.
One quality that sets Mordaunt’s supernatural stories apart from many other contemporary strange/ghostly tales is their length, with some at the length of a novella. Mordaunt excelled at these longer stories, using the space to more fully develop individual characters and to explore their motives and fears, their secret desires and obsessions, their rise and inevitable downfalls.
The first story in this volume, ‘The Weakening Point,’ is an example of a prophetic dream narrative with a very similar plot to John Buchan’s story ‘Basilissa’, which was published in Blackwood’s in 1914 and later developed into his 1926 novel The Dancing Floor. However, unlike Buchan’s story, there is no happy ending and the impending doom of the recurring dream never abates. Bond Challice struggles with an ominous dream every year on his birthday, to such an extent that his life becomes paralyzed by fear. Challice remarks, ‘I’ve never read anything adequate about fear. I’ve never heard anyone say anything that’s any use about it – that gives one any idea of what it really is’ (21). And indeed, the story is as much about Challice facing his fear as it is about meeting the monster in his dreams. In many ways, the two things are one.
There are also definite, yet subtle, class and societal tensions in the story. Like the monster in his dream, Bond Challice seems to live in progressively smaller rooms, as the expectations that accompany his role as aristocrat and heir to the Challice estate give him constant anxiety. He fails at being a soldier, leaves Cambridge, loses his fiancée, fails at everything. Bond doesn’t seem to ‘fit’ anywhere. To Bond’s father, ‘It appeared to him inexplicable that he and his wife, normal as they were, should have produced anything so abnormal as Bond had grown to be’ (35). Challice’s loyal friend Patterson is asked by Bond’s mother to help her son, not thinking about the inconvenience to him or the financial strains he is put under at the repeated requests. The narrator also notes that Bond had access to help that others not of his class would not have: ‘If he had been a poor man he would have been in a lunatic asylum with an infinitesimal chance of ever getting well again – permeated with the very atmosphere of madness’ (34). The real point of fear in this story is not the impending death symbolized by the imagined monster, but the reality of a life wasted.
‘The Country-side’ is a tale of witchcraft tinged with folk horror. The locals and their traditions are seen from the perspective of Margaret Wister, the rector’s wife and an outsider. Coming from the city, she represents a threat to the inhabitants of the isolated village and must carefully manoeuvre within the village’s rigid social structures. Her status as a marginal character puts her in contact with another outsider, Mrs Orpin, the local wise woman whom many fear as a witch in league with the devil. Yet it is through Mrs Orpin that Margaret is able to make her husband confess his less-than-religious habits. Indeed, by the narrative’s end, Mordaunt manages to craft a tale both of a woman’s suffering and of womanly power, as the rector and his Christian faith are literally overpowered by a group of women practicing folk magic.
With the relentless loneliness and isolation of the rural setting, Margaret is haunted well before her encounter with Mrs Orpin. The tension gradually builds as the battle between the old ways and the new – folk magic and Christian religion – reaches a climax. Yet, as with her other stories, Mordaunt is careful never to lose the human element. The cultural conflicts between urban and rural, old and new religion, and traditional and modern ways of thinking are encapsulated in the literal battle over Margaret’s soul in the final pages as the traditional Welsh belief in sin eating provides one of the most effective shock endings in all of Mordaunt’s short fiction.
‘The Vortex’ is a story of creative obsession. In many ways, Lawrence Kestervon is reminiscent of Bond Challice; he is a lost soul who has failed so often in life that he has little left to lose. And herein lies the problem. Kestervon becomes fixated on making his latest play a success, but to what cost? Mordaunt explores what happens when someone puts their heart and soul into the creative process and considers what can happen when that ‘soul’ is pure evil. Once again, imagination and reality are combined to create an uneasy sense of something being not quite right. The actors and actresses in the play feel this uneasiness but are powerless to prevent themselves (and their real lives) from being taken over by their not-so-fictional characters.
At the beginning of ‘The Fountain,’ an epigraph by the sixth-century Welsh poet Taliesin gives a clue to the story’s folkloric influences. The story reflects the ancient Druidic belief in the transmigration of souls and individuals reborn into different forms. It also draws upon the legend of the gwenhidwy (or gwenhudwy), a mermaid originating in Welsh folklore. The aptly named Sylvia Colquhoun embodies the natural world around her and exists as a liminal figure throughout the story. She never fully fits into the extravagant, society world of her husband, who further isolates Sylvia due to his philandering and numerous affairs, including one with Sylvia’s supposed friend. This sense of liminality is closely linked to the supernatural elements of the story. At one point the narrator describes how Sylvia exists as an elemental entity as well as a woman:
while to some it seemed like a shadowy plume of water, to others it bore the aspect of a woman, ethereal as mist. ‘Both!’ cried one hussy, brazen with fear, asserting what must have seemed, to her own limited intelligence, an impossibility. ‘Both at once! Not altogether a woman, nor altogether water.’ (174)
Harry Colquhoun likewise says, ‘People can’t be things; there’s animate and inanimate nature. Oh, hang it all, running water is animate enough, but … Well, I learnt it all at school, but I can’t put it into words; you know what I mean – water’s not like – well, human beings’ (179).
In the story, death is, chillingly, not a place for rest or peace, and Sylvia remains a victim. Even in death, she is not able to completely transcend her corporeal form or her suffering. Her husband gradually comes to realize this and believes that she is being driven to haunt him by ancient, powerful forces beyond her control, forces that, he believes, are punishing him for his mistreatment of his wife. He, in turn, knows these forces demand a sacrifice. Speaking to Herries near the end of the story, Colquhoun wonders about the power of this ‘pagan belief’, asking, ‘Can a lot of people believing in a thing make, create it?’ (192). The answer to this question lies at the heart of Mordaunt’s story of loneliness and retribution.
The title character in ‘Hodge’ is one of Mordaunt’s most inventive supernatural creations. As a being from prehistory, he is a natural part of the landscape. He is not necessarily out of place, but is otherworldly in the sense that he is not supposed to exist in modern times. When the Fane siblings uncover Hodge, they also expose his behaviour that does not fit with their modern sensibilities. Consequently, Hodge cannot be allowed to fully exist in their world; he belongs to the place but not to the time. This idea connects to the spectral qualities of Hodge within the narrative, as the narrator comments, ‘for all its new-found life, it was as far away as any ghost’. Like a ghost, Hodge, after his ‘rebirth’ into a world he remembers but now cannot fathom, is forced to exist on the periphery, not able to fully become a part of the living world around him. ‘Hodge’, much like ‘The Fountain’ and ‘The Landlady’, provides an intriguing examination of protagonists that are very much between worlds. These characters’ liminality places them in a metaphorical no man’s land as each story explores how perpetual loneliness and being out of one’s natural environment can lead to a ghostly existence. In these stories, Mordaunt seems to suggest that there is no way out of this spiritual conundrum. We can become trapped in isolation and loneliness. It is perhaps no surprise, given this predicament, that each of the supernatural characters in this particular grouping of stories are also some of Mordaunt’s most sympathetic portrayals.
‘”Luz”’ blends the weird tale with science fiction as an unhinged man of science seeks to push the borders of the possible, while at the same time falling victim to hubris that leads directly to a downfall, very much in the tradition of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. Even before the horrifying events that conclude the story, Mordaunt describes the disorientation caused by a dense fog. The familiar streets and landmarks of London become unknowable to the narrator as she loses her way and becomes increasingly scared and confused. The disorientation also makes her more vulnerable to the mysterious blind man who offers her help. As with ‘The Weakening Point’, this story contains a meditation on the nature of fear. The narrator realizes that she is scared of fear itself:
Maybe my fear was all the wilder in that it was concerned with nothing definite. I did not even think of death. In truth, I did not fear anything – ‘to fear’, that is the verb, carrying a different, and, for me at least, a less dreadful meaning. It was Fear itself which had me in its grip, stark, unreasoning – ‘shrill, hair-bristling Fear’. (203)
The sense of something present, something not defined but there nonetheless, pervades this claustrophobic tale of obsession and science gone wrong.
‘The Landlady’ is a reflection on our emotional connections with certain places and how a shared experience of a place can bring us together. It is also about the power of memory and how memories can make the past seem more real and tangible. In the opening paragraph, the narrator asks, ‘Why should there not be ghosts of the living as well as of the dead? Why – come to that – should not the word stand, simply and solely, for the true ego of any one of us?’ (216). The story certainly pushes the boundaries of what – or who – constitutes a ‘ghost’, as another character declares, ‘She’s not a ghost, I tell you, at least not in the ordinary way’ (224). The story also interrogates meanings of ‘house’ and ‘home’ and notions of dwelling and possessing. Later, Miss Champneys says about returning to her ‘real’ home, ‘It will be like going to heaven’. But as with the other stories in this collection, the notion of heaven is complicated by the end of the story and represents not so much a release as an imprisonment, an unfulfilled move to another house that is not her true home. The past may be another country, but in Mordaunt’s story, it is also home.
‘Four Wallpapers’ is a classic haunted house tale. Mordaunt inventively plays with time as, through the concept of layered wallpapers, readers experience, or ‘view’, the haunting from ‘last’ to ‘first’. In this story, Mordaunt once again effectively uses first-person narration to give an immediacy and directness to events. We see the ghosts through the eyes of the narrator, and as with previous stories, the past (and past indiscretions) resurface to affect the living. The descriptions of the ghosts and their movement through the wallpapered room is strikingly original, in many ways anticipating how ghosts would appear visually on film. As in ‘The Villa,’ the house comes alive with troubled energy, and we see apparitions pass in and out of view. The wallpaper is very much like skin – strip it off and it reveals the sinews and bones (the inner workings) of a troubled house that has refused for many years to be a home.
‘The Villa’ concerns generational haunting and a curse that backfires on a young couple looking for the perfect home. It is based on Mordaunt’s trip to Ragusa (in present-day Croatia) in 1914. In Sinabada, she recalled visiting the house that would provide inspiration for the story: ‘I loved the Ombla so that I thought I would like to live forever on the sunny side of it, and went all round a huge old house which was for sale with a little landing-stage to the river’ (Mordaunt 1938, 170). What makes the story so unsettling is the fact that the villa takes revenge not only on the young couple who directly wish ill of its original owner, but also continues to revenge itself on subsequent inhabitants who had nothing to do with the original curse. By dwelling in the villa, they become susceptible to its anger at being robbed of its ‘rightful’ owner. Mordaunt describes the villa as a sentient being: hating, revenging, waiting. It seemingly sleeps until the next unfortunate enters its doors and falls under its control.
With each generation of the Steven family, its vengeance intensifies. The birth of Daisy Steven’s daughter, as well as the subsequent birth of her granddaughter, are each immediately followed by a death. These births are a physical representation of lingering trauma and loss and are marked by previous episodes of violence directly caused by the malign influence of the villa. Though gone, lost mothers haunt the text. The villa preys on the granddaughter of Archie and Daisy Steven, who suffers from terrible dreams associated with a place she has never seen. The sins of the fathers and mothers are visited upon the children, and their children after them, in a seemingly never-ending cycle of sorrow, grief, and forced expiation. Indeed, a feeling of loss pervades the story. The narrator imagines to herself:
Somehow or other I have missed the lightheartedness of that intermediate generation. Perhaps it did not go deep enough, was never really there at all – think of the secret, brooding sense of wrong, the truly primitive suspicions and fear and passion, which must have possessed my father, despite his veneer of modernity and gaiety, to lead to such an end. And wondering over this brings one to that other wonder as to what my mother really thought, to affect me as I was affected; though it may have been nothing more than the fact that I was conceived and passed the months before my birth in that accursed Villa. How melodramatic it looks when one writes it, and yet that is what it was. (294)
The ending of Mordaunt’s story and the ultimate fate of the villa leaves readers with an intriguing question: can intense hatred be perpetually sustained, or does it eventually wear itself out?
In Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers (1988), Dale Spender includes a brief mention of Mordaunt’s work in a chapter titled ‘The Supporting Cast.’ She says, ‘it would be helpful if her work were to be more thoroughly examined for the possible place it might provide the author in women’s literary history’ (Spender 1988, 193). Sadly, Spender’s book was published over thirty years ago, and Mordaunt’s writing is still very much underacknowledged. Though this present collection contains a selection of Mordaunt’s best supernatural tales, it is by no means comprehensive. Supernatural/Weird stories appear in every collection of short fiction she published from 1914–1939, meaning that she contributed to the genre of supernatural fiction for a quarter of a century. Yet it is difficult to find Mordaunt’s name included in anthologies along with the other ‘greats’ of the supernatural genre. It is my sincere hope that this present volume of Elinor Mordaunt’s supernatural fiction will allow her work to take its place within women’s literary history and within the tradition of supernatural fiction.
Notes
1Responding to a notice in The New York Times on 7 May 1931 that the British rights to the novel were being held up, Mordaunt wrote a letter published in The New York Times on 14 May 1931, claiming: ‘Neither Somerset Maugham nor his friends have approached me in any way in regard to the English rights; nor have I heard anything from Hugh Walpole, which is not surprising, as I am totally unacquainted with him’ (Mordaunt 1931). For more on this dispute, see Raymond Toole Stott’s A Bibliography of the Works of W Somerset Maugham (1973), 226; Ted Morgan’s Maugham (1980), 338–342; and Samuel J Rogal’s A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia (1997), 68.
2Records show that a Maurice W Wiehe, born in Mauritius in 1864, died in Southwark, London, in 1951 at age 86. Available electoral records show that he was living in St Pancras, London, in 1937–1939 and 1948.