Early Weird fiction embraces the supernatural, horror, science fiction, fantasy and the Gothic, and was explored with enthusiasm by many women writers in the United Kingdom and in the USA. Melissa Edmundson has brought together a compelling collection of the best Weird short stories by women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to thrill new readers and delight these authors’ fans.

Women’s Weird contains thirteen stories by Louisa Baldwin, D K Broster, Mary Butts, Mary Cholmondeley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Irwin, Margery Lawrence, Elinor Mordaunt, Edith Nesbit, Eleanor Scott, May Sinclair, Francis Stevens and Edith Wharton.

Highlights include:

• Edith Nesbit’s horror story ‘The Shadow’, about the dangers of telling a ghost story after the excitement of a ball.
• Edith Wharton tells an alarming story of Breton dogs and a jealous husband, in ‘Kerfol’.
• May Sinclair’s ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’ is about a love that will never, ever die.
• Mary Butts, modernist poet and novelist, wrote ‘With and Without Buttons’, a story of some very haunted gloves.
• D K Broster, best known for her historical novels, tells an unholy story of a mistress’s feathery revenge, ‘Couching At The Door’.
• Rarities include Margery Lawrence’s ‘The haunted saucepan’, and Francis Stevens’s Lovecraftian tale of tentacles in an alternate dimension, ‘Unseen – Unfeared’.

The cover image is from the April 1919 issue of Vogue, a fashion portrait of ‘Dolores’ by Adolf de Meyer.