Clotilde Graves (1863-1932)

“Only the dead are faithful to Love—because they are dead,” she said. “The living live on—and forget!” – “A Vanished Hand” (1914)

Clotilde Graves (1863-1932) was born in the Buttevant Barracks, Co. Cork on 3 June 1863. At the age of nine, Graves’s family moved to England. She worked briefly in the British Museum while studying at the Royal Female School of Art in Bloomsbury. Often unconventional and uncompromising, Graves adopted male dress and smoked in public, both frowned upon at the time. With the intention of becoming a playwright, Graves worked as a travelling actor to learn the craft. This she did, and between 1887 and 1913 she had sixteen plays produced in London and New York. Under the pen-name “Richard Dehan”, used to differentiate from her dramatic output, she also wrote historical novels as well as stories for periodicals such as Gentlewoman, World, and Judy. Graves retired in 1928 to a convent in Hatch End, Middlesex, where she died on 3 December 1932. Her short story collections include The Cost of Wings (1914), Off Sandy Hook (1915), Under the Hermés (1917), and The Eve of Pascua (1920).

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Bending to Earth: Strange Stories by Irish Women edited by Maria Giakaniki and Brian J. Showers

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Irish women have long produced literature of the gothic, uncanny, and supernatural. Bending to Earth draws together twelve such tales. While none of the authors herein were considered primarily writers of fantastical fiction during their lifetimes, they each wandered at some point in their careers into more speculative realms — some only briefly, others for lengthier stays.

Names such as Charlotte Riddell and Rosa Mulholland will already be familiar to aficionados of the eerie, while Katharine Tynan and Clotilde Graves are sure to gain new admirers. From a ghost story in the Swiss Alps to a premonition of death in the West of Ireland to strange rites in a South Pacific jungle, Bending to Earth showcases a diverse range of imaginative writing which spans the better part of a century.

Read an Extract from the Introduction to Bending to Earth.

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A Vanished Hand and Others by Clotilde Graves

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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.

Read an interview with Clotilde Graves.