Published in 2022
290 pages
Dorothy Kathleen Broster was born in 1877 near Liverpool. She attended St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and earned an Honours degree in Modern History in 1898, but the degree was not officially awarded until 1920, when the university finally allowed a generation of women scholars to receive their degrees. During the First World War, Broster volunteered as a nurse, and in 1915 she went to France with the British Red Cross. In peacetime she worked as the secretary for the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and during this time she began writing historical fiction. Her name was made by her bestselling Jacobite trilogy, The Flight of the Heron (1925), The Gleam in the North (1927), and The Dark Mile (1929). Most of her supernatural fiction appears in two collections: A Fire of Driftwood (1932) and Couching at the Door (1942). Broster never married but had a close friendship with Gertrude Schlich which lasted from the time of the First World War to Broster’s death in 1950.
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 Maordaunt’s The Villa and the Vortex (2021).
What is this book about?
D K Broster’s Weird fiction has long been forgotten, but she wrote some of the most impressive British supernatural short stories published between the wars.
Melissa Edmundson, editor of Women’s Weird, Women’s Weird 2, and Helen Simpson’s The Outcast and The Rite, all published by Handheld, has curated a selection of Broster’s best and most terrifying work. From the Abyss contains twelve stories, including:
‘Clairvoyance’, in which the ornamental weaponry in Strode Manor is more than merely decoration.
‘The Window’, in which a soldier wanders into a deserted chateau, which does not approve.
‘The Pavement’, in which the protectress of a Roman mosaic cannot bear to let her burden go.
‘The Taste of Pomegranates’ draws two women into the very, very far-off past.
‘From the Abyss’, in which two lost women may be the same person.
