Search Worlds Without End

Contents:

• 1 - The Last Bouquet - shortstory
• 33 - Madame Spitfire - shortstory
• 65 - The Fair Hair of Ambrosine - shortstory
• 91 - The Hidden Ape - shortstory
• 113 - The Avenging of Ann Leete - (1923) - shortstory
• 131 - The Crown Derby Plate - shortstory
• 149 - The Prescription - (1929) - shortstory
• 173 - Elsie's Lonely Afternoon - shortstory
• 203 - The Lady Clodagh - shortstory
• 231 - A Plaster Saint - shortfiction
• 259 - Florence Flannery - (1924) - shortstory
• 285 - Kecksies - (1925) - shortstory
• 305 - The Sign-Painter and the Crystal Fishes - shortstory
• 329 - Raw Material - shortstory

In the large room of a house in a certain quiet city in Flanders, a man was gilding a devil. The chamber looked on to the quadrangle round which the house was built; and the sun, just overhead, blazed on the vine leaves clinging to the brick and sent a reflected glow into the sombre spaces of the room. The devil, rudely cut out of wood, rested by his three tails and his curled-back horns against the wall, and the man sat before him on a low stool....

Marjorie Bowen (1885-1952) spent the early part of her working life providing for a demanding and ungrateful family. We are lucky that she did so, since among the results were these short stories of rare quality. In their use of dreams, ancient anecdote, and ruined or dilapidated buildings ('Florence Flannery', 'The Fair Hair of Ambrosine') they are at times in the finest tradition of The Castle of Otranto and the Gothic revival which had chilled the blood of the British public a hundred and fifty years earlier. But her stories are more subtle in their construction, and often use simple materials ('The Crown Derby Plate', 'Elsie's Lonely Afternoon'), interweaving their terror and mystery with the commonplace of everyday life. Their mastery of detail, sureness of expression and acute reading of human nature give them a sinister force, which is realistic and unnerving, yet at the same time tinged with pity and compassion.