BleakChesneyWold

                                             If the Devil Learnt to Play Violin  J.Meade Falkner is probably best known for the novel  Moonfleet (1898), set a century or so before, amongst the smugglers of the Dorset coast.  Moonfleet  was  filmed in 1955 and has since been regularly televised. His occult novel The Lost Stradivarius (1895) has now been republished as part of 'British Library Tales of the Weird' , edited with an introduction by Mike Ashley (2025). J.Meade Falkner wrote some five novels and two books of poems. Also a travellers guide to Oxfordshire, and local histories of Oxford and Berkshire. SOCIETY WEBSITE  Mr Ashley also includes the fact that J.Meade Falkner became a private tutor to the son of Sir Andrew Noble. Towards the end of the 19th century J.Meade Falkner became a secretary of the armaments company Armstrong Whitwo...

              Spirit Tales From Beyond The Veil -Edited by Emily Vincent                                                         Summoned to the Seance is one of the larger collections from the 'British Library Tales of the Weird' series, contains 12 stories, a chapter from a H G Wells' novel, and an extract from a Robert Browning poem. Edited with an introduction by Emily Vincent, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. Published in 2024.  It not really clear if there is such a genre as 'Seance Fiction', distinct from Ghost Stories or Weird / Horror Tales. A common theme would be a seance with a medium, or perhaps  someone using  a planchette to make a deliberate attempt to contact the Dead. But even then not all the writings on offer here meet the ...

                                              Serious Treatment of Unreality  ' The Weird Tales of William Hope Hodgson, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, is  part of the British Library Tales of the Weird series, published in 2019. Contains ten short stories.  William Hope Hodgson was born in Whetherfield, Essex in 1877: His father was the Reverend Samuel Hodgson, who was placed by the Church in different stipends, including at Middlesburgh, Nottinghamshire, Battersea, then Ireland, and finally became curate of All Saints Church in Blackburn in 1890. William was educated at school in Margate, and settled with his family in Blackburn for a year before serving in the Merchant Navy from 1891-1900. The sea became an important setting for much of his subsequent fiction, which is reflected in the above collection. TIMELINE The Blackburn Weekly Telegraph obituary of 2...