Search results for ""Handheld Press""

It is October 1939. Blanche Lancret is a French exile in England, looking after her American friend Annabelle’s baby. She is waiting for news of Annabelle’s brother Vernon, who is serving with an ambulance unit in newly-invaded France, and of her surrogate mother Tante Julie, a rich démimondaine nursing her dying husband Otto on the French Riviera. To maintain her sang-froid Blanche writes her journal, recalling how she met Vernon as a schoolgirl, her girlhood with Tante Julie in Paris and with her father in

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E Nesbit was one of the great British Edwardian storytellers, whom we now remember most for her children’s novels. But she wrote ghost stories prolifically for adults, her imagination focused on the detail of the domestic to draw out horror, chills and delight. Revel in the dark side of Victorian and Edwardian England, where visiting a house of strangers becomes a trial of nerve, and rediscovering the past leads you into strange and terrifying places. Melissa Edmundson, a noted authority on supernatural writing from this period and the curator of Women’s Weird and Women’s Weird 2, has selected the best of E Nesbit’s short scary fiction for this new Handheld Classic.

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Middle-aged Mildred is at war. She’s driving an ambulance in London during the Blitz, terrified but determined to do her bit while the bombs rain down. She’s living at her friend Daphne’s house, sleeping in the living room alongside other women volunteers on mattresses, being cooked for by the redoubtable Mrs Dove, and working her shifts at the ambulance station. She sees the nightly destruction of London’s buildings and streets close-up and death at first hand.Nine years after Business as Usual, author and illustrator Ann Stafford’s experiences in the Blitz bring British history back to life. Her novel is a fascinating report from the front lines of the Home Front in the darkest days of the war. Her heroes are the volunteers, the women and men who picked up the pieces and the bodies after the bombs stopped falling. Until the next raid ....Ann Stafford’s inimitable illustrations add authentic glimpses of life under fire on the Home Front. With an Introduction by Jessica Hammett, University of Bristol.

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D K Broster was one of the great British historical novelists of the twentieth century, but her Weird fiction has long been forgotten. She wrote some of the most impressive supernatural short stories to be published between the wars. Melissa Edmundson, editor of Women's Weird, Women's Weird 2, Elinor Mordaunt's The Villa and The Vortex 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 eleven stories, including: 'The Window', in which a deserted chateau takes revenge on anyone who opens one particular window. 'The Pavement', in which the protectress of a Roman mosaic cannot bear to let it go. 'Clairvoyance', in which the spirit of a vengeful Japanese swordmaster enters an adolescent girl. 'From the Abyss', in which the survivor of a car crash is followed out of the gorge by her doppelganger.

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A powerful and moving novel from 1921, about the lives and choices of modern women, by Canadian author Marjorie Grant. Latchkey ladies live alone or in shared rooms in London at the end of the First World War. They are determined to use their new freedoms and tread a fine line between independence and disaster. Maquita Gilroy is a Government clerk with a lively sense of self-preservation. Anne Carey is drifting between jobs, bored of her fiancé, and longing for something to give her life meaning. Then she meets Philip Dampier, a married man whose plays she admires. Petunia Garry, a beautiful teenage chorus girl with no background and dubious morals, is swept up by an idealistic country squire, determined to mould her into what he wants his wife to be. Gertrude Denby, an Admiral’s daughter and an endlessly patient companion to an irritating employer, is so very tired of living out her life in hired rooms. ‘Fear woke her in the defenceless hour of dawn. She sat up in bed and faced it at last, shivering so that her teeth chattered, but valiant. She was certain that she was going to have a child.’

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Elinor Mordaunt was the pen name of Evelyn May Clowes (1872-1942), a prolific and popular novelist and short story writer, working in Australia and Britain in the first thirty-five years of the twentieth century. Melissa Edmundson has curated this selection of the best of Mordaunt's supernatural short fiction, which blend the technologies and social attitudes of modernity with the classic supernatural tropes of the ghost, the haunted house, possession, conjuration from the dead and witchcraft. Each story is an original and compelling contribution to the genre, making this selection a marvellous new showcase for women's writing in classic supernatural fiction. Stories include: The Villa’, in which a Croatian mansion does things to its unlucky owners. ‘The Country-side’, in which a very ordinary infidelity demands the ultimate sacrifice. ‘Hodge’ (previously published in Women’s Weird) in which a teenage brother and sister resurrect a prehistoric man and bring him into their home. ‘Four wallpapers’, in which stripping off the wall coverings of a French chateau re-enacts a family tragedy.

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Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898-1936) was a ship's doctor serving in south-east Asia, and is one of the most important twentieth-century Dutch-language writers. His 1934 novel Adrift in the Middle Kingdom (Het leven op aarde), is an epic sweep of narrative that takes the reader from 1920s Shanghai to a forgotten city beyond the Great Wall of China. Slauerhoff's narrator is a Belfast ship's radio operator, desperate to escape the sea, who travels inland on a gun-runner's mission. He moves through extraordinary settings of opium salons, the house of a Cantonese watch-mender, the siege of Shanghai, the great flood on the western plains, and the discovery of oil by the uncomprehending overlord in the hidden city of Chungking. The fantasy ending transforms the novel from travelogue and adventure to existential meditation. But running like a thread of darkness through the story is opium, from poppy head harvesting to death through addiction. This translation by David McKay, winner of the 2018 Vondel Prize, is the first English edition of Slauerhoff's most accessible and enthralling novel. The Introduction is by Slauerhoff expert Arie Pos and Wendy Gan of the University of Hong Kong.

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Vita Sackville-West was infatuated with her. Virginia Woolf hated her. Sir John Reith resented her but couldn’t do without her skills: she transformed the BBC into a broadcaster for the people. Lady Astor was her close friend, making a way for her into the heart of Britain’s political, cultural and intellectual aristocracy. Hilda Matheson was one of the most important women behind the scenes in Britain’s public life between the wars and an influential networker between feminist, media and political powers. She packed more into her short life than most people would even think possible. Every challenge was accepted, and she lived her life to the full.Hilda worked for MI6 in the First World War, then became Lady Astor’s political secretary, the first woman MP to take her seat in the House of Commons. Poached by Sir John Reith, Hilda moved to the BBC to become the first Talks Director for the fledgling BBC, but Reith turned against her liberalising energies, and Hilda resigned rather than compromise her principles. Selected to lead a monumental survey of African economics and natural resources Hilda laid the groundwork for the move away from British colonialism. At the beginning of the Second World War she was put in charge of a new propaganda unit to tell Britain’s story to its allies and enemies alike through recordings, images and books. Having suffered all her life from Graves’ disease, which afflicted her with the phenomenal energy levels she needed to tackle the huge tasks in her career, Hilda died during a routine operation in 1940, aged 52.The life of Hilda Matheson is told by her first biographer Michael Carney and by BBC producer Kate Murphy. This passionate, loving woman has finally been the given the memorial her energies and achievements deserve. Her letters to Vita Sackville-West and the Astor papers form the heart of her story, revealing her candid and devoted nature.

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All Rose Macaulay’s anti-war writing, collected together in one fascinating and thought-provoking volume. Her novel Non-Combatants and Others (1916) is a classic of pacifist writing, and was one of the first novels to be written and published during the First World War that set out the moral and ideological arguments against war. It’s scathing and heart-breaking, yet finds a way for pacifists to work for an end to conflict. Her journalism for The Spectator, Time & Tide, The Listener and other magazines from the mid-1930s to the end of the Second World War, details the rise of fascism and the civilian response to the impending war. Witty, furious and despairing in turn, these forgotten magazine columns reveal new insights into how people find war and its tyrannies creeping up on them. These are supported by Macaulay’s two inter-war essays on pacifism,`Apeing the Barbarians’ and `Moral Indignation’. Macaulay’s only wartime short story, `Miss Anstruther’s Letters’, is a devastating account of the loss of her flat and all her possessions in the Blitz. But more desperate a loss than her books were the letters from her secret lover, who had just died. The Introduction is by Jessica Gildersleeve of the University of Southern Queensland. The cover illustration, `Peace Angel’, is by the Norwegian caricaturist Olaf Gulbransson, published in the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus in 1917.

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Rose Macaulay’s 1920 satire on British journalism and the newspaper industry will be back in print in the UK for the first time in seventy years. It will be published alongside a new collection of her pacifist writing from 1916 to 1945, Non-Combatants and Others: Writings Against War (ISBN 9781912766307). Potterism is about the Potter newspaper empire, and the ways in which journalists struggled to balance the truth and what would sell, during the First World War and into the 1920s. When Jane and Johnny Potter are at Oxford they learn to despise their father’s popular newspapers, though they still end up working for the family business. But Jane is greedy, and wants more than society will let her have. Mrs Potter is a well-known romantic novelist, whose cheap novelettes appear in the shop-girls’ magazines. She has become unable to distinguish fact from fiction, and her success gives her an unhealthy estimation of her own influence. When she visits a medium to try to find the truth about the murder of her son-in-law, she wreaks terrible damage. Arthur Gideon works for Mr Potter as an editor. He respects his employer’s honesty while he despises the populist newspapers he has to produce. His turbulent campaigning spirit, and his furious resistance to anti-Semitic attacks, make him unpopular, and becomes an unwitting target of malice.

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Betty Bendell was one of the top five British women's magazine columnists in the late 1960s and 1970s. She wrote continuously for a range of magazines, including Annabel, Woman, Homes and Gardens, The Lady and The Countryman, but she was most well-known for her long-running columns in Good Housekeeping and Family Circle. She was perceptive, direct and funny, one of the leading comic writers of her day. This collection of the best of Betty Bendell, from Good Housekeeping and other magazines, will delight and amuse. From 'My dollyrocking days are over' (1966) to her last column for GH in 1980, these 87 pieces have been chosen for their glorious humour, their social history and absolute embeddedness in British life in the late 1960s to 1980. Betty recorded her era from the perspective of a mother and a wife at home, in the school playground, at the parties, in the garden, on holiday, in the shops, and queuing at the supermarket, speculating wildly about the lives of her friends and neighbours.

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Handheld Press presents a fearful anthology of forgotten stories to persuade you that a stone hand has been placed on your shoulder when you least expect it, or that something heavy is scraping its way up the stairs. Well-known authors of the uncanny such as Eleanor Scott, Edith Wharton, H P Lovecraft and Arthur Machen are showcased with long-forgotten masters and mistresses of supernatural short stories to frighten the heart into some loud thumpings.Authors include:Sabine Baring-Gould, E F Benson, Nellie K Blissett, Bernard Capes, James Causey, Robert W Chambers, N Dennett, W W Fenn, H P Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, W C Morrow, Oliver Onions, E R Punshon, Eleanor Scott, Clark Ashton Smith, and Edith Wharton.Henry Bartholomew, editor of our Algernon Blackwood anthology, The Unknown (March 2023), has curated this selection and written the Introduction. The Living Stone will be the ninth of the Handheld Weirds: landmark anthologies to redefine the birth of Weird fiction.

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There's No Story There is about the lives of conscripted workers at Statevale, an enormous rural munitions factory somewhere in England during the Second World War. The workers are making shells and bombs, and no chances can be taken with so much high explosive around. Trolleys are pushed slowly, workers wear rubber-soled soft shoes, and put protective cream on their faces. Any kind of metal, moving fast, can cause a spark, and that would be fatal. All cigarettes and matches are handed in before the workers can enter the danger zone, and they wear asbestos suits. When a journalist is asked why she hasn't written about this secret factory, she shrugs, and says 'There's no story there.' With so much death just waiting to happen, why aren't the workers' stories told? The Introduction by Lucy Scholes explores this wartime trilogy by Holden against her life as a novelist and Bright Young Thing in the 1930s, and as a wartime journalist.

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Following the success of Handheld Press's 2019 best-selling anthology Womens Weird, British Weird is a new anthology of classic Weird short fiction by British writers, first published between the 1890s and the 1930s. Embracing the famous and the undeservedly obscure, this collection - curated by James Machin, author of Palgrave Gothic's Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880-1939 - assembles stories to thrill, entertain, and chill. Featured stories include: 'Man-Size in Marble' by Edith Nesbit (1893) 'No-Man's Land', John Buchan (1900) 'The Willows', by Algernon Blackwood 'The Man Who Went Too Far', by E F Benson (1912) 'N' by Arthur Machen (1934) 'Mappa Mundi' by Mary Butts (1937) The collection also includes Mary Butts' influential essay 'Ghosties and Ghoulies' (1933), on British supernatural writing. Machin's introduction describes the background for these excellent stories in the Weird tradition, and identifies their use of peculiarly British preoccupations in supernatural short fiction.

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The Exile Waiting was the first novel by the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist Vonda N McIntyre, published in 1975. It introduces the world that McIntyre later made famous with her multi-award-winning Dreamsnake: a post-apocalyptic world in which Center, an enclosed domed city, is run by slave-owning families who control the planet's resources, and exile the dissidents. It is an ordinary day. A transport arrives from off-world, piloted by two pseudosibs, a powerfully intelligent threat to Center's dominant families. A girl is punished for being in the wrong room under the gaze of the wrong person. A visiting stranger defends the wrong victim, and the wrong person is attacked. These ordinary mistakes set in motion a train of events that will relieve the suffering and return the exiles. They have been waiting for Center to fall, so that they can make it better. Also included in this edition, the first republication of McIntyre's short story `Cages', originally published in Quark 4 in 1972, in which she first created the pseudosibs and their terrible origins. Vonda N McIntyre's most well-known novel is Dreamsnake (1978), which won the 1979 Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel. She was a biologist by training, and the author of several Star Trek and Star Wars novels and many short stories. Her 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun was filmed in 2013 as The King's Daughter. She died in 2019.

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Endorsed by Neil Gaiman and Greer Gilman, this new edition of Sylvia Townsend Warner's final collection of short stories brings her fantasy writing to a new readership. Originally published in The New Yorker, and in book form in 1977 these sixteen sly and enchanting stories of Elfindom show Warner's consummate mastery of realist fantasy that recalls the success of her first novel, the witchcraft classic Lolly Willowes (1926). Warner explores the morals, domestic practices, politics and passions of the Kingdoms of Elfin by following their affairs with mortals, and their daring flights across the North Sea. The Kingdoms of Broceliande in France, Zuy in the Low Countries, Gedanken in Austria and Blokula in Lappland entertain Ambassadors, hunt with wolves and rear changelings for the courtiers' amusement. The fairy ruling classes are charming and insolent, and all levels of fairy society are heartless, in human terms. But love and hate strike at fairies of all ranks, as do poverty, abandonment and the passions of the heart. Enter Elfindom with care.

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T H White, author of the much-loved The Sword in The Stone, The Once and Future King, The Goshawk, and many other works of English literature, died in Greece from a heart attack in 1964, aged 57. When the eminent novelist and critic Sylvia Townsend Warner heard of his death she wrote in her diary: ‘T H White is dead, alas! – a friend I never managed to have.’ Warner was invited by White’s executors to write his biography. She visited his home in Alderney in the Channel Islands to see what material was available and felt that he followed her around in his house; ‘his angry, suspicious, furtive stare directed at my back, gone when I turned around’. When she finished his biography, nearly three years later, she wrote, ‘O Tim, I don’t like to lose you … it has been a strange love story between an old woman and a dead man’. T H White. A Biography was published in 1967 and was Warner’s greatest critical success since her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926). It reveals White’s passions: for life, for learning, for all animals and birds, particularly hawks and dogs; his self-exile to Ireland during the Second World War, the creation of his tetralogy The Once and Future King, and the unexpected wealth and fame that came from The Sword in the Stone, the Disney cartoon and the Broadway musical Camelot. Warner treats White’s repressed sexual predilections with humane understanding in this wise portrait of a tormented literary giant, written by a novelist and a poet. White’s writing on falconry was the inspiration for Helen Macdonald’s acclaimed H is for Hawk.

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'One November evening in 1925, two young women from London arrived at the village of Chaldon, in Dorset. They brought with them two suitcases, a gramophone, and a wooden boxful of records; the bare necessities. Both wore trousers and had Eton-cropped hair. The taller of the two, Mrs Turpin, had come to the country to recover from a recent operation to remove her hymen.' Mrs Turpin was Valentine Ackland, on the run from her recent disastrous marriage. She was soon to meet the love of her life, Sylvia Townsend Warner, already a celebrity for her dashing debut novel Lolly Willowes. They would live in Dorset together in a passionate relationship until Valentine's death in 1969. Valentine was a dedicated poet, deeply involved with Communism during the 1930s, and an environmentalist and peace campaigner. Recently released MI5 files show that she was blacklisted for confidential work during the Second World War, and remained under long-term surveillance. Despite her commitment to Sylvia, Valentine had many affairs with women who fell for her androgynous beauty and her masterful conduct of an amour. She also struggled with alcoholism, but the relationship with Sylvia survived all challenges. Frances Bingham has written the definitive biography of this remarkable cross-dressing woman, poet and activist, recovering an important part of British lesbian history and creating a testament to queerness and gender identity in Valentine's transgressive life.

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Business As Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford was first published in 1933. It's a delightful illustrated novel in letters from Hilary Fane, an Edinburgh girl fresh out of university who is determined to support herself by her own earnings in London for a year, despite the mutterings of her surgeon fiancée. After a nervous beginning looking for a job while her savings rapidly diminish, she finds work as a typist in the London department store of Everyman's (a very thin disguise for Selfridges), and rises rapidly through the ranks to work in the library, where she has to enforce modernising systems on her entrenched and frosty colleagues. Business as Usual is charming: light, intelligent, heart-warming, funny, and entertaining. It’s deeply interesting as a record of the history of shopping in the 1930s, and also fascinating for its unflinching descriptions of social conditions, poverty and illegitimacy. `Jane Oliver’ was the pen-name of Helen Evans (1903-1970). Formerly Clemence Dane’s secretary, she developed a writing career, and wrote many successful novels with Ann Stafford (the pen-name of Ann Pedlar, also known as Joan Blair). Business as Usual was their first joint novel. Jane became a pilot and married the author John Llewellyn Rhys, who was killed in the war. She founded the Llewellyn Rhys Prize in his memory. She later lived in Hampshire near Ann Pedlar, and cared for her in illness until her death.

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‘Most people knew in their hearts that the lid had been taken off hell, and that what had been done in Guernica would one day be done in London, Paris and Berlin.’ Margaret Kennedy’s prophetic words, written about the pre-war mood in Europe, give the tone of this riveting 1941 wartime memoir: it is Mrs Miniver with the gloves off. Her account, taken from her war diaries, conveys the tension, frustration and bewilderment of the progression of the war, and the terror of knowing that the worst is to come, but not yet knowing what the worst will be. English bravery, confusion, stubbornness and dark humour (‘Nanny says that an Abbess is threatening to swallow the whole of Europe’) provide the positive, more hopeful side of her experiences, in which she and her children move from Surrey to Cornwall, to sit out the war amidst a quietly efficient Home Guard and the most scandalous rumours. Where Stands A Wingèd Sentry (the title comes from a 17th-century poem by Henry Vaughan) was only published in the USA, and has never been published in the UK before. Margaret Kennedy (1896-1967) made her name as a novelist with The Ladies of Lyndon (1923) and The Constant Nymph (1924), and continued publishing until the year before her death. The Introduction will be by Faye Hammill, Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow.

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Blue Remembered Hills is Rosemary Sutcliff’s memoir of her childhood, youth and her first love affairs. It’s a classic of perfect writing about her close and not always easy relationship with her bipolar mother, life in the naval dockyards where her father was based, and the beloved family dogs, interspersed with her stoic endurance of physical and emotional pain. Sutcliff writes with joy about her fleeting childhood friendships in a lonely life as an only child. Her lyrical descriptions of the beauty around their remote house in Devon distract the reader from realising the excruciating clinical treatment Sutcliff underwent for years to repair the damage caused by Still’s Disease on her joints. She describes how her isolation and her awareness of being physically different informed some of her b

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In 2003 the former Women's Press editor and critic Sarah LeFanu published her acclaimed biography of Rose Macaulay with Virago Press. 'A magnificent job ... imaginative and thoughtful, dense with distilled information ... LeFanu offers a skilled, visual, intellectual and emotional picture of a complex woman' -Independent 'A fine biography ... rich and perceptive ... Sarah LeFanu [is] an able and astute judge of Macaulay's writings' - Times Literary Supplement As well as writing the biography, LeFanu was keeping a detailed journal of her research trips and her processes as a biographer, arguing with herself over what to include, what to pursue, and what to leave behind. Her immersion in her research led to Rose intruding in her dreams, and fantastical imaginings of what Rose would say or do, at each fork in the road. Dreaming of Rose is a remarkable record of the art of biography, and the search for another woman's life. Research trips to Varazze in Italy to look for Rose's childhood, and to Trabzon in Turkey to find traces of The Towers of Trebizond, were remarkably intuitive ventures that found treasures in unexpected places. Dreaming of Rose is also a memoir of a woman juggling the demands of teaching, research and writing while patching together a living. LeFanu's work on Rose was squeezed in between many other commitments and responsibilities: she wrote for the BBC and taught creative writing and English literature. Suffused with the tensions and dramas of everyday life, and the necessity for intellectual integrity, this is an important memoir of women and writing.

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The first edition since 1946, with full colour illustrations throughout. 'At last she reached the brow of the hill ... now the country opened out below her and she looked down into a wide and lovely valley ... Still patched with snow the little fields spread like a carpet below her and here and there a farmhouse with barns and golden ricks was clearly seen. Across the plain ran, straight as a ruler, a railway line and she saw a toy train puffing and crawling across the picture.' Malcolm Saville's classic novel is about eleven-year old Jane's discovery of nature and country life during a year spent convalescing on her uncle's farm, after having been dangerously ill in post-war London. This deeply-felt novel was written while Saville was extending his range as a writer, alongside his very successful Lone Pine adventure series, and nature anthologies for children. Inspired by the experiences of Saville's own god-daughter, this marvellous novel is full of the wonder of discovery, as well the happiness of regaining health, making friends, and learning to love the natural world. The novel is also a record of rural England eighty years ago, written by one of the great twentieth century English nature writers. The Introduction is written by Hazel Sheeky Bird of the University of Newcastle. The illustrations by Bernard Bowerman have been reproduced from the first edition.

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'This long-hidden treasure-trove of letters, with its many wonderful new photographs and illustrations, is a revelation. The "other woman's" voice is heard, and the shape of the Warner-Ackland-White love-triangle changes subtly. The Akeing Heart is the most important and startling addition in decades to what we know about these perennially fascinating writers.' Claire Harman, author of Sylvia Townsend Warner. A Biography and The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner The Akeing Heart is the long-lost story of the deep and passionate relationships between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White. Their intellectual and emotional integrity that endured over twenty years of heartache is revealed here in the rich correspondence preserved by Elizabeth from their relationship, and reconstructed by her godson, Peter Haring Judd. Valentine was the serial seducer, Elizabeth the passionate lover newly aware of her sexuality, while Sylvia kept faith in anger and despair. Elizabeth's long-term partner Evelyn Holahan emerges from the background to their story, as Sylvia's friend, and as a firm dash of realism to Valentine's romanticism. The correspondence over twenty years between the four women in this agonised relationship -in letters, poems, telegrams, keepsakes and notes -makes this book one of the finest collections of twentieth-century literary letters about love and its betrayals. Originally self-published by the author in 2013, this new edition of The Akeing Heart brings this supplement to Sylvia and Valentine's story to a wider readership. `Judd's story is an engrossing one, and the best of the Warner letters evince her characteristic joy in language and observation. Most moving are her efforts to retain Elizabeth's friendship while allowing the affair to take its course.' Times Literary Supplement

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In the late 1920s Topsy is a girl about town, a society deb, a dashing flapper. She writes breathless, exuberant letters to her best friend Trix about her life, her parties, her intrigues, and the men in her life. One particular man draws her into politics, and to Topsy’s amazement, she is elected as a member of Parliament.

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Following the success of Handheld Press's republication of Sylvia Townsend Warner's fantasy collection Kingdoms of Elfin, in October 2018, the remaining four Elfin stories are gathered together with the remarkable forgotten tales of The Cat's Cradle Book (1940). This is the last major fantasy collection by Warner to be republished for a new generation of fantasy enthusiasts and Warner fans. The twenty-three stories in Of Cats and Elfins encompass scholarship (Warner's ground-breaking essay from 1927 on modern Elfinology), black humour, the Gothic, and the bizarrely anthropomorphic cats of The Cat's Cradle Book, which enact Warner's preoccupation with the dark forces at large in Europe in the later 1930s. The Cat's Cradle opens with a story about the talking cats that die of a murrain in a manor based on Warner's own Norfolk home with Valentine Ackland. `The Castle of Carabas' continues the story begun in `Dick Whittington'. `The Magpie Charity' is a political fable satirising institutional charity, `The Phoenix' relates an unfortunate combustion in the bird collection of Lord Strawberry, and `Bluebeard's Daughter' narrates the adventures of Bluebeard's daughter by his third wife, and her propensity for locked doors. Warner mixes fables and myths with storytelling traditions old and new to express her unease with modern society, and its cruelties and injustices. Greer Gilman's Introduction studies the amalgamation of fantasy and political concern that produces Warner's most radical writing. Greer Gilman is the author of Moonwise and Cloud & Ashes, and two critically-acclaimed novellas about the poet Ben Jonson, as well as poetry and criticism. Her fantasy fiction, rooted in British myth and ritual, has won the Tiptree, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards.

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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.

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John Llewelyn Rhys (1911-1940) was born in Abergavenny. He published The Flying Shadow in 1936 (also reissued by Handheld Press), and in 1939 published The World Owes Me A Living (filmed in 1945). Both were powerful novels about British aviation in the 1930s: the planes, the pilots, their need to be in the air, their skill and bravery, their hard-drinking lives, the long-distance record-breaking attempts, and death through accidents and taking one risk too many. In August 1940 Rhys died in an RAF training flight. His widow, the novelist Jane Oliver (author of Handheld’s best-selling Business as Usual), assembled his last book for publication: a collection of short stories published in 1941 as England is My Village. It won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize in 1942, and in the same year Jane Oliver set up the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in her late husband’s memory: ‘something to give young writers the extra chance he didn’t get’. This new edition of England is My Village, and The World Owes Me A Living is a stunning rediscovery of this brilliant writer. ‘Had he lived,’ an obituary noted, ‘he might have become the Kipling of the RAF.’ Rhys’s prose is spare and direct, with no words wasted. The dialogue is immediate, conveying mood, emotion, relationships, character and action with precision. The stories date from 1936 to 1940 and remind us of the responsibilities placed on very young men flying thousands of feet up in the air in boxes of metal, petrol and canvas. The Introduction is written by Kate Macdonald and Luke Seaber.

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Tatting was Faith Compton Mackenzie''s last novel, and revisits the early years of her marriage living in the parish of an eccentric High Church Anglican vicar in Cornwall, beset by formidable women. Mandolinata was Faith''s first book, a collection of fourteen short stories set in Capri, Rome and London, all written in the 1920s, about sex, love and bad marriages. This volume bookends the lost works of this neglected British writer. Tatting is a handicraft that uses thread to weave intricate patterns in knotwork. This idiosyncratic novel from 1957 by Faith Compton Mackenzie traces patterns across the Cornish landscape in the style of David Garnett and Sylvia Townsend Warner. A mandolinata is played on mandolins: complex, melancholy and lyrical. This collection of fourteen short stories was Faith Compton Mackenzie''s first book from 193

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In the 1930s, flying was all the rage. All over Britain women and men had grown up watching wartime flying aces perform aerobatics in the sky. Now they too were learning how to fly. Robert Owen is the only son from a Welsh vicarage, now a brilliant pilot and flying instructor, recently of the Royal Air Force. He has taken a new job at the flying school at Best, a prosperous cathedral town in England. Flying has never seemed so alluring and so terrifying. Human frailty is tested in the drilling and repetition of hours in flight, and Robert’s skills as a pilot and in diplomacy with pupils with delusions about their competence are tested to their limits. And then he falls in love, risking his heart as well as his body in the air.

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Emerging out of the 1940–1941 London Blitz, the drama of these two short works, a novel and a memoir, comes from the courage and endurance of ordinary people met in the factories, streets and lodging houses of a city under bombardment. Inez Holden’s novella Night Shift follows a largely working-class cast of characters for five night shifts in a factory that produces camera parts for war planes. It Was Different At The Time is Holden’s account of wartime life from April 1938 to August 1941, drawn from her own diary. This was intended to be a joint project written with her friend George Orwell (he was in the end too busy to contribute), and includes disguised appearances of Orwell and other notable literary figures of the period. The experiences recorded in It Was Different At The Time overlap in period and subject with Night Shift, setting up a vibrant dialogue between the two texts. Inez Holden (1903-1974) was a British writer and literary figure whose social and professional connections embraced most of London's literary and artistic life. She modelled for Augustus John, worked alongside Evelyn Waugh, and had close relationships with George Orwell, Stevie Smith, H G Wells, Cyril Connolly, and Anthony Powell. The introduction and notes are by Kristin Bluemel, exploring how these short prose texts work as multiple stories: of Inez Holden herself, the history of the Blitz, of middlebrow women’s writing, of Second World War fiction, and of the world of work.

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John Buchan (1875-1940), author of over 100 books including The Thirty-Nine Steps, was a stealth writer of supernatural and Weird fiction. From the beginning of his career to his last works, he brought supernatural elements into his narratives to test his characters and thrill his readers. His 1932 novel The Gap in the Curtain was his last full-length work devoted to exploring a supernatural theme: if you were able to see one year into the future, what would you do with that foreknowledge? And what would it do to you? The novel tells the story of five country-house guests who are trained by the ailing Professor Moe, an Einsteinian mathematician who has devised a way of seeing into the future. These five guests gain one piece of knowledge from the experiment, and have to decide how to act on it. The episodes vary from high drama to social comedy, and use Buchan's skill in writing political intrigue and adventure abroad. This is a novel that showcases Buchan's talents as a storyteller, and is a thoroughly satisfying read. The Introduction is by Kate Macdonald, author of John Buchan. The Mystery Companion and many other works on Buchan's writing.

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In 1935 Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was a well-established novelist, reviewer, columnist and feminist wit. She was part of the 'intellectual aristocracy' of England, but was also passionately interested in everyday life and its foolishnesses. Personal Pleasures is an anthology of 80 short essays (some of them very short) about the things she enjoyed most in life. Her subjects include: Bed (Getting Into It) Booksellers Catalogues Christmas Morning Driving a Car Flattery Heresies Not Going to Parties Shopping Abroad Writing While each essay can be read on its own as a short dose of delicious writing, the collection is also an autobiographical selection, revealing glimpses of Rose's own life, and making us laugh helplessly with her inimitable humour.

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