A Vanished Hand

Introduction by Melissa Edmundson
Cover image by Brian Coldrick

“Only the dead are faithful to Love — because they are dead.”

Clotilde Graves was known for challenging convention. In her early years, she was known as the dramatist “Clo Graves”, but became better known under her fiction-writing persona, “Richard Dehan”. She transgressed contemporary gender norms by dressing in male attire, wearing her hair short, and smoking in public. This border crossing can be seen also in her work, which encompasses a wide variety of forms and modes. And while she wrote relatively few fantastical stories, she was devoted to tales of lingering revenants, mysterious cryptids, and grotesque sciences—often laced with her sardonic sense of humour. This volume seeks to recover this side of Graves’s writing by including stories from across her career, which challenge definition and range across the speculative genres.

Contents

• "Introduction" by Melissa Edmundson
• "How the Mistress Came Home"
• "A Spirit Elopement"
• "Lilium Peccatorum"
• "A Vanished Hand"
• "Lady Clanbevan’s Baby"
• "Peter"
• "Clairvoyance"
• "The Compleat Housewife"
• "The Mother of Turquoise"
• "The Tooth of Tuloo"
• "The Great Beast of Kafue"
• "The Friend"
• "Dark Dawn"
• "Miss Clo Graves at Home"
• "Alias Richard Dehan"
• "Sources"

Clotilde Graves (1863-1932) was born in Co. Cork on 3 June 1863. Often unconventional and uncompromising, she not only adopted a male pseudonym, but male dress and manners as well. Under the name “Richard Dehan”, she wrote historical novels as well as several collections of short stories. Her popular novel The Dop Doctor found success on the screen in 1915. Graves retired in 1928 to a convent in Hatch End, Middlesex, where she died on 3 December 1932.

Melissa Edmundson specialises in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British women writers, with a particular interest in women’s supernatural fiction. She is author of Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013) and Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire (2018). Her anthologies include Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 (2019), Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937 (2020), and a collection of Elinor Mordaunt’s fiction, The Villa and The Vortex: Supernatural Stories, 1916-1924 (2021).

Limited Hardcover