Friends of the SFPL Big Book Sale, Fall 2013 (Part 2)

I posted a couple of days ago about the highlights of my purchases at the fall Big Book Sale.  Hopefully you're not TOO bored with hearing about the book sale yet, as this is a sort of sequel, to show you a few odds and ends I also picked up.

Inevitably, at every book sale I come across a few books that I know little or nothing about but which are nevertheless seductive in some strange way and leave me no choice but to bring them home.  Sometimes they turn out to be exciting finds, and sometimes I end up donating them back to the library.  But hey, it's all for a good cause.

This year, I wound up with three of these.

The first is by Elisabeth Ogilvie, and I knew her name was familiar but couldn't recall who she was.  It turns out that she's an American writer I was familiar with from recommendations of her Tide trilogy, set in Maine.  At any rate, I probably couldn't have resisted the cheesy cover:

Though you have to admit the one above is less cheesy than another edition of the book:

Then there was a book called Someday I'll Find You, by Margaret Widdemer, a writer I hadn't come across before who also turns out to be American.  It also turns out that Fleur Fisher recently wrote enthusiastically about one of Widdemer's early novels, The Rose-Garden Husband, which gives me more hope for this book than I would have had based on the cover.  But regardless of whatever other glowing qualities the book could turn out to possess, I don't think I could ever have resisted a caption like this: "The modern story of a young girl who experimented with men, women and jobs, and got what wasn't coming to her." 

The mind boggles.

I was also interested in the back cover, which advertises other titles in the "Triangle Books" series.  Apart from the perky and easily pleased people portrayed at the top, the list of titles and authors is tantalizing.  A few of the women writers, such as Bess Streeter Aldrich and Mary Roberts Rinehart, are familiar.  But my obsession with tracking down obscure writers makes me perversely intrigued by the likes of Judith Kelly's Marriage Is a Private Affair, Faith Baldwin's Office Wife, and Helen Topping Miller's Song After Midnight.  Now, these might not sound like masterpieces, but I would note that I have a copy of Margery Sharp's wonderful and hilarious The Stone of Chastity that was published in the similar, mainstream, low-cost Tower Books series, so I am keeping an open mind! 

In addition, this advertisement reveals why I was never able to find information about Maisie Grieg, a romance writer I added to my list recently, who sounded rather charming based on one contemporary review I came across.  It turns out that that was because the Sydney Morning Herald, wherein I found the review, completely butchered her name, which is actually Maysie Greig.  Sadly, although I can now find information about her, and she does seem to have potential to be a highly enjoyable writer, I also have to remove her from my list, since it turns out she was definitively Australian.  Although I have met many lovely Australians and hope someday to add their many great writers to my list, for now I am quite overwhelmed enough by the Brits!

And finally, I was completely and irrationally seduced by this cover:

At least it turns out that the poetically-named Lane is indeed British (a new name for my list!).  She seems, at a quick glance, to have been a prolific writer of historical novels, many with Catholic themes, and the present title, according to Wikipedia, deals with "Titus Oakes and the 'Popish Plot.'"  I probably should know what that is, but alas I do not.  Drat the American education system!

I also picked up a relatively nice copy of Madeleine Henrey's Madeleine Grown Up.  Henrey was born and raised in France, so she doesn't quite fit my list, but she is still of interest and spent most of her life in the U.K. and wrote extensively about her life there.  Oddly, she wrote most of her books under her husband's name (Robert Henrey), though apparently she was actually the sole author.  Her works included several memoirs of life in London and in other locales during World War II.

And speaking of Australian novelists, although I can't add her to my list yet, Christina Stead has long been one of my favorites, and on Tuesday I found a lovely American first edition of her 1966 novel, Dark Places of the Heart (aka Cotter's England).

The next one was sort of an odd one for me to pick up. I've never even read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but for some reason I picked up a cute little copy of Kate Douglas Wiggin's earlier book, The Village Watch Tower, which some optimistic (or perhaps unscrupulous?) bookseller identified as a first edition inside the front cover.  I'm skeptical.  But does anyone know anything about the book?  Is this just a re-donation?

Beyond these, I picked up the last two volumes of Evelyn Waugh's WWII trilogy, which so many people have recommended to me.  I got volume 1, Men at Arms, a couple of months ago—and still haven't read it—but at $3 per volume for really nice little hardcover editions, I couldn't resist fleshing out the trilogy with Officers and Gentleman and The End of the Battle (aka Unconditional Surrender). 

And I grabbed an Iain Pears mystery, Death and Restoration, for some brain candy.

Alas, no Greyladies.  No Persephones.  Not even any Capuchins or Rue Morgue Press titles.  But still, for $60, a pretty successful excursion, no?  Now I'll be counting the days to the spring sale in April…

Friends of the SFPL Big Book Sale, Fall 2013

Tuesday afternoon was the biannual event around which I build my life. Well, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration?  

Or perhaps not…

The Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Big Book Sale is indeed a “big” event.  It’s held in the Festival Pavilion at the Fort Mason Center, which is large enough to resemble a warehouse and is twice a year stuffed to bursting with books that have been donated to the library.  That the Festival Pavilion is located right on San Francisco Bay with big dramatic views all around—and seems to have magical powers to make every book sale day a gorgeous, sunny, not-too-hot, not-too-cold San Francisco day—only add to the fun.

First, the preliminaries of the sale itself.

Although I did manage to take some pictures this year, I somehow forget to take any of the views, so I have swiped a couple from online.  Here’s a view of the Pavilion which shows some of its surroundings:

And here, just to shamelessly show off the gorgeousness that is San Francisco, is a view from the air—the Festival Pavilion is the left-most building jutting out onto the Bay:

We always leave work early on Book Sale day, and Andy and I arrived an hour early to get in line.  Even so, this was the line in front of us:

And as the 4:00 opening time approached, this was the line behind us:

There are a lot of excited book geeks as opening time arrives and the line starts moving:

And once inside, there are just a few (!!!) tables of books to look over:

And when it came time to check out, this is where we were in line:

FYI, the cash registers are along the entryway near the doors and windows that you can see in the distance.  In previous years, we have sometimes been even further back in line, but every year the sale is extraordinarily well-organized and has about ten checkout stations staffed with cheerful volunteers, so the line moves quickly (and sometimes we use the waiting time to find unexpected items of interest—often discarded by other shoppers in line ahead of us—so the karma all works out).

But now, on to the more important part—the book haul!

This year was a bit of a mixed bag.  For one thing, either the selection wasn't as good as usual or I exercised considerable restraint (hard to believe), as I only spent about half of my budgeted $120.  In past years, I have blown the budget and brought home as many as 60 books (with the accompanying bookcase reshuffling that such extravagance required), but this time I made it out with only 20.  Perhaps I have just developed more discerning (or more obscure) tastes!

However, I have to say that the 20 I came home were probably the best haul, qualitatively, that I've ever made.  So I won't tease you any longer—here are the highlights:

Yes, believe it or not, for the first time ever, I actually found a coveted D. E. Stevenson—an edition from the 1970s, I believe, and not one of the rarer ones, but still, her fans will know how rare it is to stumble across any of her books anywhere, let alone for a measly $3!

Below that in my pile is my second "golden age" Elizabeth Cadell (i.e. from the 1950s, when she seems to have done her most charming work), The Cuckoo in Spring, which accompanies the one I found at the spring book sale in April.  Apart from the fact that I love her novels from this period, this one has the added interest of a book plate from the Francisca Club, which turns out (as a handwritten note says—helpfully added by a previous owner beneath the book plate) to be the oldest women's club in San Francisco, and it apparently still exists, though their website is singularly uninformative.  It also has the dust cover blurbs and author photo pasted inside the cover, with a nice pic of Cadell that I hadn't seen before:

Now, I have to say here that poor Andy, who generally thinks I need psychiatric care for my book obsession, nevertheless always steadfastly accompanies me to these sales, patiently waits in line for an hour, races in alongside the frantic throngs of geeks to get to the fiction and mystery tables, and searches for a whole list of authors on my behalf.  He should quite probably be sainted for this.  Especially since it is usually a thankless task and he rarely finds more than one or two, because my tastes are so obscure.

This year, he searched diligently for over an hour and finally came back to me and reported complete failure. 

But, he said…

There was one book he had picked up just because he thought it looked like my kind of thing, even though it wasn't on the list and he wasn't sure I would be interested.  And he proceeded to pull out what was at least an early—if not a first—edition of Elizabeth von Arnim's Mr. Skeffington.  It's a lovely book in itself, but it also comes complete with an inscription by its original owner (Catherine Lavelle, of San Antonio, Texas), which says the book was purchased on May 23, 1940.  Although I am sometimes annoyed by inscriptions in used books, when they are this old—with war already raging in Europe, though the U.S. wasn't yet a formal part of it—they somehow just add to the character of the book.

So, definitely not a failure for Andy!  (Maybe I don't even need to give him lists in the future—I can just rely on him knowing "my kind of thing"!)

Also in the pile, you can see Elizabeth Goudge's autobiography, The Joy of the Snow, which should be very interesting and which, on the back, has a lovely photo of Goudge.

Near the top of the pile (and almost impossible to make out in the photo) is Monica Dickens' Man Overboard in a cute little edition from the "Companion Book Club."  It amazes me how many book clubs there were mid-century, and it's often hard to track down any information at all about them, but as it would happen, Abe Books has an informative little article on the Companion Book Club, along with an array of its other titles.

Below the Dickens book is my very first Norah Lofts.  I've never really known if I would like Lofts, because I tend to be ambivalent about historical fiction.  However, first, the book is one of those charming (albeit fragile) titles published in accord with wartime restrictions, and I couldn't resist actually owning one instead of merely getting them from Interlibrary Loan all the time.  And second, the opening line of the novel made it seem rather "up my alley": "For nearly fifty years I had performed the tasks and carried out the duties which fall to the lot of the unmarried and not-quite-independent member of a large family."

And finally, some odds and ends in the pile.  I've always meant to read Cynthia Asquith's diary, and this lovely hardcover edition with only slight wear will surely inspire me to do so.  Ditto with Eliza Fay's letters from India.  And the Ivy Compton-Burnett may actually be a first American edition and is at any rate a very nice, reader-friendly little book, so I couldn't resist.

All in all, then, even if this is a smaller-than-usual haul, I certainly can't complain about its quality.  Nor can I complain about having money left in my budget!  Instead of eenie-meenie-minie-moe, it will be Greyladies-Persephone-Amazon-Awesome Books—hmmm, who will get the money that's left?

Since this is already a long post, and since I'm out of time at the moment, I'm going to hold off on writing about a few other interesting (hopefully) tidbits from the sale.  Check back in a day or two for a bit more…

Update: The Edwardians (Part 1 of 4) (!!!)

I have to admit that sometimes I can even overwhelm myself with my obsessiveness. 

Which is what happened in the past couple of weeks as a result of my innocently checking out from the library The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction, edited by Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell, and David Trotter.  This book focuses—in amazing and meticulous detail—on the literature of the years 1900-1914.  It's particularly brilliant in its attention to numerous lesser-known writers of that period, which makes it an invaluable resource for me.  The period covered is really just on the fringe of my own date range, but many of the writers mentioned continued writing well after 1914.  I came across it because it kept coming up in my Google results when I was searching for obscure writers—but its actual content was usually hidden or merely excerpted for obvious reasons of copyright.  So I finally got it from the library, figuring I would find a few new writers for my list, flesh out the earlier years of my time frame, and that would be that.

And indeed I did find a few new writers…

160 of them, to be exact.

Which is all to the good, but nevertheless a bit overwhelming, even for my Overwhelming List.  At one point, I found myself so buried in new names that I flirted with the notion of adjusting the time frame covered by my list.  Suddenly, 1920-1960 started to look like a rather elegant date range!

But ultimately I realized I had to stick with 1910 as my start date.  Most importantly, there are all of those World War I writings by women, many of which eloquently express the sense of combined liberation and trauma of those years for women—and some of which do so in strikingly original, experimental ways.  And then there's also Virginia Woolf's famous if perhaps facetious declaration that ''On or about December 1910 human character changed," which lends me some support for my start date. 

If it's good enough for Virginia…

Florence Bell (aka Mrs. Hugh Bell),
whose Miss Tod and the Prophets (1898)
sounds intriguing

So I am powering through my overwhelmedness and will be adding the 160 writers to my list in four updates over the next two or three weeks.  And I have to say I have come across quite a few writers who seem genuinely intriguing and unexpected, and managed to enrich my own perspective on those early years—which I have tended to avoid, imagining only a plethora of scandalous potboilers, earnest social realism about vivisection, the "New Woman," and other social issues of the day, or impossibly pure tales of pristine heros and heroines overcoming impossible odds.

Suffice it to say that there is indeed a healthy mix of all of those types of writers in these updates.  But there are also a surprising number of authors who seem to have been ahead of their time, or to challenge the accepted restraints of the fiction of their day, and I'll try to point out the ones I found most interesting.

Portrait of Ellen Cobden, by her husband
(later estranged), Walter Sickert, whom 
crime writer Patricia Cornwell 
believes was Jack the Ripper--
no wonder they became estranged...

So, in this first batch of 40 writers, which basically encompasses the A's through F's, some of the ones I want to look at more closely include:

Eleanor Acland, whose 1904 novel In the Straits of Hope, about artists in Chelsea, could be interesting;

Florence Bell (aka Mrs. Hugh Bell), who made her obligatory contribution to the "new woman" theme, but also wrote Miss Tod and the Prophets (1898), apparently the humorous tale of a spinster who, taken in by a doomsday prospect, lives it up with her limited resources, and finds herself broke when the world fails to end as scheduled;

Gertrude Bone, whose Women of the Country (1913), with "its decisive but unsensational focus on the experience of women" (as OCEF puts it), tells of a middle-aged spinster attempting to help a pregnant unmarried girl, sounds like an interesting writer overall, and her books were often illustrated with etchings by her husband Muirhead Bone and her son Stephen Bone;

Ellen Cobden, who was not only the author of two well-received novels, The Wistons (1902) and Sylvia Saxon: Episodes in a Life (1914), but was also married for a time to Walter Sickert, the painter whom crime writer Patricia Cornwell identified as Jack the Ripper in her 2002 book Portrait of a Killer (for better or worse indeed!—though I should point out that very few people take Cornwell's solution very seriously);

Lucy Dale and Gertrude Faulding, who, in the course of successful careers in other areas of writing (Dale was a historian and Faulding a children's author), wrote two novels together, both featuring strong, educated women characters: Time's Wallet (1913) is an epistolary novel featuring two educated, politically-involved women, and Merely Players (1917) deals with a successful woman playwright's troubled marriage;

and Alice Louisa Dudeney (aka Mrs. Henry Dudeney), whose tales of working class life were compared to the likes of Thomas Hardy and American short story writer Mary Wilkins Freeman (who I also highly recommend).

Also in this part of the alphabet were three writers who really were too early to fit my time frame, but who are each of interest for one reason or another.  I'm not adding them to the main list, but thought I'd mention them anyway:

Charlotte Eccles (aka Hal Godfrey) wrote two humorous novels which seem worth a look: The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1897), set in a boarding-house, and The Matrimonial Lottery (1906), about a woman editor of a troubled newspaper who rejuvenates her career by marrying money

Olive Birrell, whose novel Love in a Mist (1900) OCEF describes as a "conventional romance" but also as "an unusual portrait of young working women"

Mary Deane, who turns out to have been P. G. Wodehouse's aunt, and wrote children's books and novels including the romances The Rose-Spinner (1904) and The Other Pawn (1907)

These have all been added to the main list now. Hope you all find some writers of interest here as well!

  

Etching by Stephen Bone, from his mother
Gertrude Bone's novel Mr. Paul (1921)

Current count: 491 writers

ELEANOR ACLAND (1880-1933) (aka Margaret Burneside and Eleanor Cropper)
	Author of the novels In the Straits of Hope (1904), a novel about artists in Chelsea, and Dark Side Out (1921), a multi-generational family saga, as well as a memoir, Goodbye for the Present (1935).
ADELAIDE MARIA ALBANESI (1859-1936) (pseudonym of Effie Henderson, aka Effie Rowlands)
	Author of more than 200 romantic novels from the 1890s until the 1930s, apparently characterized by gushing prose and fainting heroines; title include Poppies in the Corn (1911), The House That Jane Built (1921), and Claire and Circumstances (1928).
MRS. A. E. ALDINGTON (1872-1954) (pseudonym of Jessie May Godfrey Aldington)
	Mother of novelist Richard Aldington and innkeeper at the Mermaid Inn in Rye; author of several novels of Kentish village life, including Love Letters That Caused a Divorce (1905), A Man of Kent (1913), and The King Called Love (1913).
AMY J[OSEPHINE]. BAKER (dates unknown)
	Now forgotten author of 40 romantic novels spanning five decades, including I Too Have Known (1911), The King's Passion (1920), Aurora (1928), Never Laugh at Love (1932), Fan Mail (1941), Swing Low, Swing High (1956), and Summer Isles of Eden (1962).
HYLDA BALL (dates unknown)
	More research needed; sister of Kathlyn Rhodes and author of several novels from the 1910s to 1930s, including A Vase of Clay (1914), The Unhallowed Vow (1918), Peep o' Day (1929), and A Moorland Vendetta (1934).
MRS. HUBERT BARCLAY (1872-1952) (pseudonym of Edith Noel Daniell Barclay)
	Author of five romances in the 1910s—Trevor Lordship (1911), A Dream of Blue Roses (1912), The Giant Fisher (1912), East of the Shadows (1913), and The Taste of Brine (1914)—after which she appears to have stopped writing.
JANE BARLOW (1857-1917)
	Poet and novelist known for verse and fiction about Irish farm life and often incorporating Irish dialect; titles include Kerrigan's Quality (1894), The Founding of Fortunes (1902), and In Mio's Youth (1917).
E. BARRINGTON (1862-1931) (pseudonym of Eliza Louisa Moresby, aka Elizabeth Louisa Beck and Lily Moresby Adams)
	Having travelled widely for most of her life, Moresby only began writing at age 60, after which she explored themes of spirituality, romance, and the supernatural; titles include The Key of Dreams (1922), Dreams and Delights (1922), and The Exquisite Perdita (1926).
MRS. HUGH BELL (1851-1930) (pseudonym of Florence Eveleen Eleanore Olliffe Bell)
	Stepmother of Gertrude Bell; playwright, children's author, and novelist whose works include the New Woman novel The Story of Ursula (1895), the intriguing Miss Tod and the Prophets (1898), about a spinster taken in by doomsday prophets, and The Good Ship Brompton Castle (1915).
JEANNIE GWYNNE BETTANY (1857-1941) (aka Mrs. Coulson Kernahan or J. G. Kernahan)
	Prolific author of popular, if implausible, romantic adventure novels, including The Mystery of Magdalen (1906), Ashes of Passion (1909), The Trap (1917), The Whip of the Will (1927), and A Village Mystery (1934).
SIBELL LILIAN BLUNT (1878-1962)
	Author of nine novels, primarily of exotic romance, sometimes mixed with fantasy; titles include Sons of the Milesians (1906), Out of the Dark (1910), The Temple of the Winds (1925), and Zeo the Scythian (1935).
GERTRUDE BONE (1876-1962)
	Author of stories and several books illustrated by her husband Muirhead Bone, as well as three novels; perhaps most intriguing is Women of the Country (1913), about a spinster helping a pregnant unmarried girl.
MARIAN BOWER (dates unknown)
	Author of light stories and novels from the 1890s to the 1930s, including The Wrestlers (1907), Skipper Anne: A Tale of Napoleon's Secret Service (1913), The Chinese Puzzle (1919), and Gotobedde Lane (1928).
MAUD CHURTON BRABY (????-1932)
	More research needed; author of at least two novels—Downward: A 'Slice of Life' (1910) and The Honey of Romance (1915)—and two early marriage manuals, Modern Marriage and How to Bear It (1909) and The Love-Seeker: A Guide to Marriage (1913).
MARGUERITE BRYANT (1870-1962)
	Novelist whose work seems—based on contemporary reviews—to have included rather overwrought melodramas; titles include The Dominant Passion (1913), The Shadow on the Stone (1918), and Dear Idiot (1926).
EMILY HANDASYDE BUCHANAN (1872-1953) (aka Handasyde)
	Author of several chilly high-society romances in the 1900s, Buchanan apparently returned to publish one further novel, Spare That Tree, in 1939, about which I could locate no information.
MRS. M. CHAN-TOON (1872-1922) (pseudonym of Mabel Mary Agnes Chan-Toon, née Cosgrove, second married name Woodhouse-Pearse)
	Married to a Burmese barrister and apparently a close friend of Oscar Wilde, Mabel Chan-Toon wrote novels exploring interracial relationships, including Leper and Millionaire (1910) and Love Letters of an English Peeress to an Indian Prince (1912).
ELLEN COBDEN (1848-1914) (aka Miles Amber)
	Wife of painter Walter Sickert and sister of publisher T. Fisher Unwin, Cobden seems to have begun writing late in life; she apparently published only two novels, The Wistons (1902) and Sylvia Saxon: Episodes in a Life (1914).
GERTRUDE COLMORE (1860-1926) (pseudonym of Gertrude Baillie-Weaver)
	Poet, novelist, and early feminist; Colmore is best known for Suffragette Sally (1908, reprinted 1984 as The Suffragettes), while several other works passionately promoted her anti-vivisection views.
H[ELEN]. H[ESTER]. COLVILL (1854-1941) (aka Katharine Wylde)
	More research needed; author of nine novels from 1880 to 1928 about which I could find little information; these include The Stepping Stone (1905), Lady Julia's Emerald (1908), The Incubus (1910), and The Lily of Lombardy (1928).
DOROTHEA CONYERS (1869-1949) (née Blood-Smyth)
	Author of several dozen light romantic novels, often featuring Irish sporting themes; titles include Lady Elverton's Emeralds (1909), The Financing of Fiona (1916), Uncle Pierce's Legacy (1920), Bobbie (1928), and Gulls at Rossnacorey (1939).
MRS. GEORGE CORBETT (1846-1930) (pseudonym of Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett)
	More research needed; novelist and crime writer, many of whose works appeared in periodicals and have not been fully documented; known works include the utopic New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1890), The Marriage Market (1905), and An Unwilling Husband (1922).
MARIE CORELLI (1855-1924) (pseudonym of Mary Mackay)
	Massively successful popular novelist whose bestsellers often featured mystical or religious themes, including Barabbas: A Dream of the World's Tragedy (1893), a fictionalized version of the crucifixion, and The Sorrows of Satan (1895); she continued publishing until shortly before her death.
CONSTANCE COTTERELL (dates unknown)
	More research needed; author of eight romantic novels such as Strange Gods (1889), The Virgin and the Scales (1905), The Honest Trespass (1911), The Perpetual Choice (1915), and Chain the Unicorn (1933).
MARGUERITE CURTIS (dates unknown)
	More research needed; author of five novels which tended to mix religion and the supernatural, including The Bias (1908), Marcia: A Transcript from Life (1909), Oh! for an Angel (1911), The Dream Triumphant (1912), and The Dividing-Line (1913).
BARONESS ALBERT D'ANETHAN (1860-1935) (pseudonym of Eleanora Mary d'Anethan, née Haggard)
	Sister of H. Rider Haggard and author of several novels of her own, many of which made use of her time living in Japan with her diplomat husband, including Two Women (1909) and The Twin-Soul of O'Take San (1914).
EDITH DART (1871-1924)
	Poet and author of five novels; Likeness (1911), about a typist who is the twin of a millionairess and impersonates her at a ball, sounds almost farcical, but Sareel (1920), about a girl from a workhouse who becomes a servant on a farm on the moors, is surely a bit darker.
C[ATHERINE]. A[MY]. DAWSON-SCOTT (1865-1934)
	Poet, playwright, novelist, and founder of International PEN (and later its historian), Dawson-Scott also wrote rather dark feminist novels, the later of which were influenced by Dorothy Richardson; titles include The Agony Column (1909), Against the Grain (1919), and The Haunting (1921).
MRS. PHILIP CHAMPION DE CRESPIGNY (1860-1935) (pseudonym of Rose Key Champion de Crespigny)
	Painter, mystery writer, and novelist; her early novels featured spunky girls in historical situations, but later work such as The Mark (1912) and The Dark Sea (1927) deal with supernatural and spiritualist themes, as does her memoir This World and Beyond (1934).
LUCY DALE (dates unknown)
	Later a successful historian, Dale published two novels in collaboration with Gertrude Faulding (see below)—Time's Wallet (1913), an epistolary novel about two educated, politically-involved women, and Merely Players (1917), about a woman writer's troubled marriage.
ALICE DEASE (1874-1949)
	Novelist of Irish Catholic themes; works include Some Irish Stories (1912), The Lady of Mystery (1913), about a man buying back his ancestor's estate, Down West and Other Sketches of Irish Life (1914), and The Debt of Guy Arnolle (1919), after which she seems to have stopped publishing.
THEO DOUGLAS (dates unknown) (pseudonym of Henrietta Dorothy Everett, née Huskisson)
	Author of historical romances and melodramas, often with a supernatural component, from the 1890s until 1920; titles include A White Witch (1908), Miss Maybud: Marriage-Maker (1920), and Malevola (1914), a lesbian-themed vampire story.
MRS. HENRY DUDENEY (1866-1945) (pseudonym of Alice Louisa Dudeney, née Whiffin)
	Earning comparisons in her time to Thomas Hardy and American writer Mary Wilkins Freeman, Dudeney published dozens of novels and story collections focused on working class life, including The Third Floor (1901), What a Woman Wants (1914), and The Peep Show (1929).
K[ATHLEEN]. M[ARY]. EDGE (????-1946)
	Living in India with her father and then her husband, Edge wrote four novels, three of which—Ahana (1902), The After Cost (1904), and The Shuttles of the Loom (1909), display her knowledge of India, while the fourth, Through the Cloudy Porch (1912), is set in South Africa.
FLORENCE FARR (1860-1917)
	Compose, playwright, actress and novelist; known for a high-profile affair with George Bernard Shaw and her collaborations with William Butler Yeats; she also wrote two novels—The Dancing Faun (1894) and The Solemnization of Jacklin (1912).
GERTRUDE MINNIE FAULDING (1875-1961)
	Known for children's books about flowers and fairies, Faulding published two novels in collaboration with Lucy Dale (above)—Time's Wallet (1913), an epistolary novel about two educated, politically-involved women, and Merely Players (1917), about a woman writer's troubled marriage.
FLANEUSE (dates unknown) (pseudonym of ?  Maud Yardley?  Elinor Glyn?)
	Pseudonym used for numerous works of fiction between the 1910s and 1930; OCEF speculates more than one author could have written under the name—possibly Maud Yardley and/or Elinor Glyn; works include Scored! (1913) and The Triumphant Woman (1918).
ANGELA FORBES (1876-1950) (pseudonym of Angela Selina Bianca St. Clair-Erskine Forbes)
	Organizer of WWI catering services and author of risqué (for their time) novels and memoirs, including The Broken Commandment (1910), The Other Woman's Shadow (1912), and Should She Have Spoken? (1923).
MRS. WALTER R. D. FORBES (1866-1924) (pseudonym of Eveline Louisa Michell Farwell Forbes)
	Author of nine novels about which little information is available; titles include Blight (1897), A Gentleman (1900), Nameless (1909), and His Alien Enemy (1918).
M. E. FRANCIS (1859-1930) (pseudonym of Mary Sweetman Blundell)
	Author of several dozen novels, both as sole author and, in later years, in collaboration with her daughters Margaret and Agnes Blundell; works focused on rural life, and titles include The Manor Farm (1902), Hardy-on-the-Hill (1908), and Dark Rosaleen (1915).

Alice Louisa Dudeney, compared to Thomas Hardy
and American writer Mary Wilkins Freeman

Eleanor Acland, whose 1904 novel
In the Straits of Hope seems of interest