The Outcast and the Rite: Stories of Landscape and Fear, 1925-38

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 (1925). 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.

The Introduction is by Melissa Edmundson, the leading scholar of women's Weird fiction and supernatural writing from the early 20th century.--Publisher


About the Author
Helen de Guerry Simpson (1897-1940) was born in Sydney, New South Wales. In 1914, she travelled to France and then the UK to continue her studies. She read French and music at the University of Oxford. Her studies ended in 1921 when she broke university regulations which prohibited male and female students from acting together. In 1927, she married the surgeon Sir Denis John Browne. Her first novel, Acquittal, was published in 1925. One of her most successful works, Boomerang, was published in 1932 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Another novel, Under Capricorn (1937) was adapted into a 1949 thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She died in 1940 from cancer, leaving a daughter.