Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937

Published in 2020
195 pages

Melissa Edmundson is Lecturer in British Literature at Clemson University and specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British women writers, with a particular interest in women’s supernatural fiction. She is the editor of a critical edition of Alice Perrin’s East of Suez (1901, 2011), and author of Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013) and Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire (2018). Her other work includes essays on the First World War, ghost stories of H D Everett, and haunted objects in the supernatural fiction of Margery Lawrence, as well as a chapter on women writers and ghost stories for The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story. She has edited Avenging Angels: Ghost Stories by Victorian Women Writers (2018). Her Handheld Press titles include Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 (2019), Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937 (2020), and Elinor Mordaunt’s The Villa and the Vortex (2021).

What is this book about?
For fans of the best-selling Women’s Weird anthology comes the next installment of stories by female writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that embrace the supernatural, horror, and the Gothic.

Edited by literary historian Melissa Edmundson, Women’s Weird 2 features thirteen classic Weird short stories that showcase how these authors moved beyond the traditional ghost story and into areas of Weird fiction and dark fantasy. A detective, a young woman caught in a rainstorm, an author acquiring witchcraft skills—these are examples of how women continued to push and defy the genre expectations of the era.

Authors include: