The Villa and the Vortex: Selected Supernatural Stories, 1916-1924

Elinor Mordaunt was the pen name of Evelyn May Clowes (1872-1942), a prolific and popular novelist and short story writer, working in Australia and Britain in the first thirty-five years of the twentieth century. Melissa Edmundson has curated this selection of the best of Mordaunt's supernatural short fiction, which blend the technologies and social attitudes of modernity with the classic supernatural tropes of the ghost, the haunted house, possession, conjuration from the dead and witchcraft. Each story is an original and compelling contribution to the genre, making this selection a marvellous new showcase for women's writing in classic supernatural fiction.

Stories in The Villa and The Vortex include:

The Villa’, in which death is brought into a Croatian mansion, but it’s not so easy to ask it to leave.

‘The Country-side’, in which a very ordinary infidelity demands the ultimate sacrifice.

‘Four wallpapers’, in which stripping off the wall coverings of a Spanish chateau re-enacts a family tragedy.

‘Hodge’ (previously published in Women’s Weird) in which two adolescents bring a prehistoric man into their own time, and their home.