
The Australian novelist and playwright Helen de Guerry Simpson (1897-1940) published many supernatural short stories. This new edition selects the best of her unsettling writing, adding some little-known stories to her 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric. Featured stories include: ' An Experiment of the Dead', in which a visitor comes to visit a woman in the condemned cell. 'Good Company', in which a traveller in Italy becomes temporarily possessed of a hitchhiker in her mind. 'Grey Sand and White Sand' is the horrifying story of a landscape artist who sees and paints a different view. 'The Outcast', in which a soldier left for dead in the War takes his revenge on his village. 'The Rite', in which a discontented woman enters a wood, and emerges transformed. Helen de Guerry Simpson was born in Sydney, New South Wales, and studied at Oxford. Her novel Boomerang won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1932. She died from cancer in 1940. Her close friend, the novelist Margaret Kennedy, took charge of Simpson's daughter Clemence during the war while Simpson was in her last illness. Clemence and Simpson both feature in Kennedy's wartime memoir, Where Stands A Winged Sentry, also published by Handheld Press. The Introduction is by Melissa Edmundson, the leading scholar of women's Weird fiction and supernatural writing from the early 20th century.
Author

NOT Helen Simpson short story writer, born 1959. Helen Simpson was an Australian-born writer, who lived in England from the age of 16. She studied music at Oxford, before becoming a novelist, a writer of historical biography, a radio broadcaster and a politician. She joined the 1931 Detection Club, and wrote a chapter for Ask a Policeman 1933. Works: Novels: Acquittal (1925) The Baseless Fabric (1925) Cups, Wands and Swords (1927) Mumbudget (1928) The Desolate House (1929) Enter Sir John (1929)(with Clemence Dane)-filmed as Murder! (1930) by Alfred Hitchcock Printer's Devil (1930)(with Clemence Dane) Vantage Striker (1931) Boomerang (1932), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize Re-enter Sir John (1932)(with Clemence Dane) The Woman on the Beast (1933) The Spanish Marriage (1933)(with Clemence Dane) Henry VIII (1934)(with Clemence Dane) Saraband for Dead Lovers (1935, produced as a film) The Female Felon (1935) Under Capricorn (1937, produced as a film in 1949) A Woman Among Wild Men (1938)(with Clemence Dane) Maid No More (1940) Plays: Masks (1921) A Man of His Time (1923) The Women's Comedy (1926) Pan in Pimlico (1926) Poetry: Philosophies in Little (1921) Other: The Happy Housewife (1934) Translation: A selection from Louis-Sebastian Mercier's Le Tableau de Paris under the title 'The Waiting City' (1933).