The Were-Wolf and Others: The Weird Writings of Clemence Housman

The English author Clemence Housman (1861-1959) was the sister of the renowned poet A. E. Housman and the novelist Laurence Housman; but she was a distinguished writer in her own right. In 1890 she published The Were-Wolf, a vibrant exposition of the werewolf motif, in a magazine; it was published in book form in 1896. This novella captures both the terror and the sensuality of this supernatural conception, featuring a female werewolf who exercises a baleful influence on the hapless men she encounters. In 1898, Housman's full-length novel The Unknown Sea was published. This rare work involves another seductive female, the mermaid-like Diadyomene, an elusive figure whom a poor fisherman finds on a remote island near his coastal village. On the very borderline of the weird, The Unknown Sea is a rich and complex work written in an archaic and poetic idiom that enhances its elements of terror and strangeness. The short story The Drawn Arrow completes the corpus of Housman's weird output-an ethereal tale possibly set in an imaginary realm and perhaps influenced by the work of Lord Dunsany. Housman, an ardent feminist who was jailed for her protests against the denial of the vote to women, is a forgotten master of weird fiction whose work has waited too long to be resurrected. Now we can all appreciate the power and depth of her writings from the beginning to the end of her career.