This first book-length critical examination of the life and work of Marjorie Bowen (1885-1952) reveals a major English writer whose prodigious output included stories of history, romance, and the supernatural. As Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda writes in his Foreword, Bowen may be the finest British woman writer of the uncanny of the last century, a view that echoes the high regard of cultural historian Edward Wagenknecht, who called her a literary phenomenon, one whose best work places her alongside such contemporaries as Edith Wharton and Daphne du Maurier. Publicly acclaimed-known only by a series of pseudonyms (including Marjorie Bowen)-but privately inscrutable, she was and is a mysterious and complex character.

Drawing for the first time upon archival resources and the cooperation of the Bowen Estate, this book reveals a woman who saw herself as a rationalist and serious historian, but also as a mystic and dark enchantress of dread. Above all, through a lifetime of domestic storms and creative ecstasy, Bowen worked tirelessly as both a professional writer and a consummate artist, always seeking, as she once confessed, to find beauty in dark places.