[Review] The Villa and The Vortex

The Villa and The Vortex

William Brown reviews The Villa and The Vortex, an ‘exquisite’ new collection of Elinor Mordaunt’s classic weird fiction from Handheld Press.

What a treat this book is: nine exquisitely written stories from a criminally unsung queen of early twentieth-century weird fiction, gorgeously packaged by Handheld Press, and with a typically sterling introduction by Melissa Edmundson. These are tales to live and lose yourself in – haunting, horrifying, and poignant by turns.

Elinor Mordaunt was the pen name of Evelyn May Clowes (1872-1942), a prolific author of novels and short stories in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite her contemporary popularity, she has all but disappeared from history since. As Edmundson writes: ‘In the decades following her death … Mordaunt was neglected and largely forgotten as an author, her work omitted from the subsequent anthologies that helped to ensure the reputations of her fellow writers.’ On the basis of the stories in The Villa and The Vortex, that neglect beggars belief – but it also imbues the collection with an intimacy and preciousness that, dare I say it, has long-since faded from the works of her (male) contemporaries.

‘Luz’ is perhaps the most horrifying tale here. In thick smog a woman becomes hopelessly lost in the seedier areas lurking just beneath London’s attractive façade, and depends upon a sinister blind man to escort her to safety. She has spotted this man a few times, and ‘had a fancy that he reached the scene of his day’s labours – pleasure, solicitation, whatever it might be – by some altogether uncanny means; that his every action, his whole life, indeed, was nefarious.’ In our (slightly) less disability-phobic times, such a character might transpire to be a saintly hero, and the narrator’s prejudices stripped away – but not here. The story plays out like a nightmare, a disorientating catabasis into the capital’s grotesque underbelly, building to a climax as horrific as any in modern horror.

‘Hodge’ (previously published in Handheld Press’s Women’s Weird) is a very odd tale, more magical realism than supernatural in substance. Part Enid Blyton, part ‘The White People’ (Arthur Machen, 1904), it follows Rhoda and her younger brother, Hector, who live in a small Somerset village just off the coast. ‘The brother and sister were sufficient to each other, for they shared a never-failing, or even diminishing, interest … A passionate absorption in, a minute knowledge of, the wild life of the marshland; its legends and folklore; its habits and calls’; the siblings share a fantasy of a Forest that once lay in the area, which they have ‘fixed at the Miocene Period’ – though, to Rhoda’s distaste, Hector insists that there was an anachronistic sabre-toothed tiger there, too.

Somehow, they find their Forest: at the sea’s edge, ‘buried like a fly in amber: twisted trunks and boughs, matted creepers, all ash-grey and black’, it is ‘nothing more than a fold out of the old world, squeezed up to the surface’. After this initial discovery – as readers we wonder whether it was really there or merely a product of Rhoda and Hector’s shared imagination – the Forest disappears again. The siblings grow up; they drift apart; the Forest – whether or not it truly exists – becomes a point of silent contention between them. But then Hector claims to have found it again, and sure enough, there it is – along with a curious figure, the eponymous ‘Hodge’, who might well be the ‘missing link’: ‘An ape – a sort of ape – nearish to a man, but – well, look at its hair’, as Rhoda observes. Now, if you’re expecting fish-out-of-water shenanigans a la California Man (US, Les Mayfield, 1992), you’re in for a bit of a shock: Mordaunt takes the tale in a surprisingly dark direction. Above all, ‘Hodge’ is fascinating from a gender studies perspective; there is a sense that Hodge manifests Hector’s own developing masculinity, a primal sexuality which he is repulsed by in himself, and which he must vanquish if he is to become a socially acceptable man.

‘The Weakening Point’, too, focuses on a man subject to a peculiar haunting. From birth, Bond Challice – the last of a prestigious but doomed lineage – has been plagued by a recurring nightmare. Every year on his birth-night, he ‘has a dream – almost like a sort of seizure – which obsesses him with terror’. Throughout The Villa and The Vortex, Mordaunt comes across as a dissector of horror as well as, as R. Brimley Johnson dubbed her, a ‘dissector of souls’, and this tale doubles as a philosophy of the uncanny. ‘Anything which persists, which appears at regular intervals, which approaches nearer and is still incomprehensible, is likely to affect even the strongest nerves. And perhaps it was the steady sequence of the dreams which frightened Bond more than anything else’, the narrator theorises:

‘The scene was always the same. He saw the monster at the end of a long vista of brilliantly lighted rooms, but each year the number of rooms which lay between them became one less. Inversely, as the shape grew nearer it seemed to become slightly smaller, though no plainer and no less terrible – rather it was as if the fearfulness of it concentrated to something more poignant each year.
 
If it had skipped a room, had retreated, had even rushed at him, he felt that he could have endured it better; it was this steady progress which helped to make it all so unendurable’.
 

The meat of this story’s horror is the existential impact of this intangible threat upon Challice. In the tradition of Henry James, the horror here is pre-eminently psychological rather than supernatural; it is a monster, a haunting, of the mind, which Mordaunt ultimately leaves open to interpretation. ‘I’ve never read anything adequate about fear’, Challice tells the narrator at one point. ‘I’ve never heard anyone say anything that’s any use about it – that gives one any idea of what it really is’. He goes on to explain:

‘It’s a sort of sweating hell. It pricks out in pins and needles all over the back of one’s hands, and up one’s arms. It makes one feel as if one had no inside, and one’s eyes were on fire. But it’s more than that. It’s as if everything you are or have been – all the centre of your life, all that you’ve inherited, all that race and civilization and reason has given you – was being torn up by the roots. And yet it’s got a frightful sort of fascination about it. It’s as if you were – I can’t explain – but you know those old pictures of the Last Judgement? Well, it’s as if one was all of that in oneself; and yet standing aside, swaying and sick – utterly rotten – emptied! Absolutely unable to go away and take one’s eyes off the damned thing…’
 

In stories such as ‘The Weakening Point’ and ‘The Country-side’, Mordaunt’s ‘soul dissection’ is particularly striking. Writing in uncluttered, unstilted prose, she nonetheless touches upon the psychological and emotional acuity of the likes of Woolf and Plath, portraying the traumas and predicaments of her characters with breath-taking concision and compassion. There is an aching intimacy in every line, a real sense of the author’s soul being laid bare – it is not surprising that, as Edmundson writes in the introduction, an ‘integral part of the creative process’ for Mordaunt was that ‘good writing must come from within the author’s own experiences’.

Edmundson quotes Mordaunt as having said that: ‘though I had friends all over the world, I had no great or intimate friends; too many people had died, and I had nothing and nobody to tie me anywhere … From the very first the fates planned for me to walk alone and to possess nothing that I have not earned; and once in possession they snatch what I have away from me as quickly as possible.’ It is the horror of loss and isolation, of usurpation and entropy, that most deeply haunts these pages. Consider Margaret Wister’s plight in ‘The Country-side’, in which elements of folk horror – primitive rurality (‘Your true rustic is suckled on spells, incantations, and superstitions’), a local witch with second sight – are merely catalysts for a horror which is much more mundane and domestic in nature: a marriage coming undone, and one half of it (the wife) being usurped in grimly Darwinian fashion: ‘If Robert was guilty there remained only one thing to be done, to put herself, her barren, useless self, out of the way so that he might legalize the child which Trixie Hargreaves would bear to him’, Margaret harrowingly reflects. As a counterpoint, check out ‘The Fountain’, later in the collection, where a woman avenges her patriarchal erasure – albeit from beyond the grave.

‘Although women are estimated to have produced at least half of all ghost stories published during the Victorian period’, notes Victoria Margree, ‘critics and anthologisers for a long time concentrated on … the male “masters of the uncanny” approach’ (Margree, 2019) – ie they prioritised the works of the likes of James, Blackwood, and Machen. Handheld Press, with Melissa Edmundson at the helm, is doing much to rectify this historic neglect: The Villa and The Vortex is the latest in several collections of women’s fiction from the label, including anthologies of short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Helen Simpson, and D. K. Broster, and two volumes of Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women. These are far from vanilla collections: Melissa Edmundson’s introductions are illuminating and scholarly, paving the way for critical attention long-past due. The stories collected in Vortex constitute an embarrassment of riches for literary and cultural analysis, but they call, too, simply to be read. Whilst a multitude of ghosts stalk these pages, Mordaunt feels very alive indeed.


Purchase The Villa and The Vortex by clicking the image below…

Sources:

Margree, V., 2019. British women’s short supernatural fiction, 1860-1930. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

William Brown

William Brown

William Brown has an MA in English Literature or some such. He’s presently researching British fairy lore and glutting on Christmas horror movies.

More To Explore

1 thought on “[Review] The Villa and The Vortex”

  1. Greg Sturman

    An excellently structured and written review, I thought. Thank you, William. I’m left feeling eager to read the book myself now. The publisher mentioned sound like they’re doing very good work. Many woman writers of the Victorian/Edwardian period do seem sadly and unfairly passed-over and thus currently unrecognized today. Having an interest in the literature, I know of many, but not as many as I maybe should do, given the suggestion women were responsible for half of the stories being then produced.

    Until an hour or so ago, I never knew a thing of Elinor Mordaunt/E.M. Clowes. I searched for more information on her, stumbling across this fine review of a collection of her work in the process after listening to this performance (mere ‘reading’ doesn’t really do it justice) of her ‘Luz’. (Which I’m very grateful I went into blind and knowing nothing, so to speak, like the protagonist.) I recommend listening to the reading heartily. (Other excellent stories by fine female authors have been recorded by the same narrator recently and are also recommended: ‘With and Without Buttons’ by Mary Butts; ‘The Nature of the Evidence’ by May Sinclair. They’re also, I think, very modern-feeling with their emphasis on the psychological.)
    LUZ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUA07QyiXTY

    Greg Sturman

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.