Sister act: Weird and wonderful tales from the other side
Springing from the heyday of magazines like Weird Tales comes a new anthology of 15 uncanny stories – classics and rarities penned by the women writers whose weird imaginings defined the pulp era.
Long before Mona Awad, Poppy Z. Brite, Mariana Enriquez, Agustina Bazterrica and Carmen Maria Machado were writing body horror, supernatural and horror tales to great acclaim, there was a first-wave of women writers whose work set the scene and established the genre with which these women would make their names.
When the magazine Weird Tales first appeared on British and American news stands in 1923, there was nothing else like it. It was truly unique. Part of its attraction was that it became a place to gather stand-alone stories and for new literary forms to be born. Weird Tales published, for the first time, stories that today would be regarded as horror, fantasy and science fiction when those genres were still evolving, but at a time when no such genre labels existed.
It would be within its pages – and among its fans and readers – that these genres would be distilled and defined. The publication became the home for self-declared “weird fiction”, the confluence of supernatural tales, fantasy adventure and cosmic horror that were published and consumed as part of a tightly cohesive community of readers, writers, editors and illustrators.
The “weird tale” itself did not come into existence with the establishment of the publication. It had its forebears in the writings of such authors as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells and many others – but it was in Weird Tales, and in the works of its most influential contributors sch as H.G. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch, that the threads spun by those many eclectic literary antecedents were woven together into something new.
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Juxtaposed between literary modernism and pulp literature, Weird Tales did not belong to either one of those worlds but to one exclusively of its own.
Much has been written about the history of Weird Tales and the many male writers whose careers it helped to launch and establish, but relatively little of its stable of female contributors.
In 2018, the British Library launched its Tales of the Weird series, unearthing and republishing the lost works of writers – many of them women – whose own “weird tales” had been long lost to archival or publishing industry misogyny or plain disinterest.
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Edited by Mike Ashley, a renowned editor and researcher of lost periodicals and anthologies, the series now comprises some 62 volumes of collected short fictions and republished horror classics that include novels by female writers including supernatural fictions by Charlotte Riddell, Gothic tales by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, dark fictions from Eleanor Scott and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, as well as anthology volumes such as Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird and the collection’s latest volume, Weird Sisters: Tales from the Queens of the Pulp Era.
In addition to being one of the UK’s foremost cultural institutions, the British Library has a publishing arm that is dedicated to resurrecting and reintroducing the works of forgotten and under-appreciated writers and it is them we have to thank for this fantastic volume of works by women writers whose literary endeavours fall squarely into that category.
some 123 women writers contributed stories to Weird Tales and Weird Sisters brings 14 of the best together in one volume
Weird Tales’ final editor, whose reign lasted from 1940 to 1954, was Dorothy McIlwraith. Under her control the magazine published some of its most original and unusual stories, many of them by women. It’s difficult to be certain about how many women writers appeared in the pages of the magazine, since the purchase records were destroyed and it is entirely likely that some women contributed under male pseudonyms or appeared simply with initials instead of first names.
The best estimate is that about 123 women writers contributed stories to Weird Tales. Weird Sisters brings 14 of the best together in one volume, along with one previously unpublished story by contemporary science fiction and fantasy writer Tanith Lee.
The authors Ashley has chosen are among the leading contributors to the magazine and include Mary Elizabeth Counselman, Catherine Lucille Moore, Margaret St. Clair, Everil Worrell and Allison V. Harding, who was the most prolific female contributor.
Ashley has also made the inspired decision to include a story by Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery, best known for Anne of Green Gables and the other Avonlea novels. Given her provincial oeuvre, her inclusion might seem strange to some, but those familiar with her life know that she was a great reader of ghost and horror stories, and hers is one of the best stories published here.
Readers of supernatural and horror fiction will find much of interest in Weird Sisters and I would also recommend exploring the other volumes in the collection.
Feminist literary and publishing scholars have unearthed, popularised and brought to publication works by many forgotten women writers working across myriad genres. This ongoing literary endeavour affords readers an unparalleled opportunity to not only read stories taken directly from the pages and archives of Weird Tales but also the novels, novellas and short fictions otherwise written by its many fascinating female contributors, all of which would remain otherwise unpublished and languishing, undeservedly, in obscurity.
Weird Sisters: Tales from the Queens of the Pulp Era. edited by Mike Ashley. British Library Publishing, $22.95.