Aldous Leonard Huxley, 27, Surrey-born author, issued his
satire Crome Yellow about a country
house party with various eccentric characters, including the hostess Mrs
Wimbush, who has an earnest interest in exotic forms of spirituality, and a
young man, Mr Scogan, who is a sardonic pessimist.
Rosita Forbes, 31, originally Joan Rosita Torr, from
Lincolnshire, published The Secret of the
Sahara: Kufara, an account of her expedition in disguise as an Arab woman
to an oasis in the Libyan Desert then closed to Westerners.
Cecil
Armstrong Gibbs, 32, composer, wrote ‘A Vision of Night’, a symphonic poem for
orchestra, and several songs with ghostly or fantastic themes, including ‘The
Mad Prince’ and ‘Five Eyes’, both with words by Walter de la Mare.
Ulric
Evan Daubeny, 33, antiquarian, published Ancient
Cotswold Churches with pen-and-ink drawings by Cecily Daubeny and his own
photographs. He was the author of The
Elemental, Tales of the Supernatural
and Inexplicable.
Edith Louisa Sitwell, 34, poet, published in The New Age, June 30, 1921, edited by A
R Orage, a spectral poem, ‘The Punch and Judy Show’: ‘And all the green blood
in my veins/Seems jerked up on the trees’ tall cranes,/ Mimics each puppet’s
leap and cry,/ Shrills to the Void, hung up on high . . .’
Charles Vince, 34, essayist and Royal National Lifeboat
Institution official, issued Wayfarers in
Arcady, a book of neo-pagan vignettes about country walks and visionary
landscape.
Austin Osman Spare, 35, London visionary and artist, issued The Focus of Life: The Mutterings of AOS,
a grimoire of his personal occult beliefs and magical artwork.
Margaret
Gabrielle Vere Long, 36, from Hayling Island, issued under the name Marjorie
Bowen a fantasy novel, The Haunted
Vintage, a story of ‘old gods, old fiends, and creatures neither ghost nor
fairy’, set in a ruined monastery.
Victor Benjamin Neuburg, 38, poet and poetry editor from
Islington, published Swift Wings: Songs
in Sussex from his own Vine Press, Steyning,a volume of pagan poetry.
Arthur
Sarsfield Ward, a 38 year old from Birmingham who wrote as ‘Sax Rohmer’,
published Bat-Wing, recounting the
adventures of Paul Harley, occult detective and consultant to the Home Office
about the shadier aspects of the London underworld.
Cecil
Hepworth, 47, London-born film director, issued The Tinted Venus, a silent film fantasy about the statue of a
goddess that comes alive, based on a story by F.Anstey, with script by Blanche
McIntosh.
James
Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence, a 47 year old Scot from the county of Angus,
author, journalist and folklorist, issued An
Introduction to Mythology and The
Mythologies of Ancient Mexico and Peru.
John Davys Beresford, 48, the son of a clergyman, from
Castor near Peterborough, issue a volume of prose vignettes, Signs & Wonders, from the Golden
Cockerel Press, brief fantasies, including a vision of the end of the world.
Walter
John de la Mare, 48, a former oil company clerk from Kent who had been awarded
a government pension in recognition of his poetry, published The Veil and Other Poems, many of them
evoking dream-like, faery or supernatural worlds, and a novel, The Memoirs of a Midget, with an
otherworldly dimension.
Ralph
Vaughan Williams, 49, composer and folk-song collector from Gloucestershire, completed
his A Pastoral Symphony, haunted by
the war-torn landscape of France, with spectral elements evident in the
mournful horns and wordless vocals.
Pamela Adelaide
Genevieve Wyndham, 50, of Salisbury, Wiltshire, issued The Earthen Vessel, A Volume Dealing with
Spirit-Communication Received in the Form of Book-Tests, with a preface by
Sir Oliver Lodge, an account of messages from her deceased son "Bim" through a spirit, Feda, controlling a medium, Mrs Leonard.
John Edward Mercer, 55, issued the singularly well-informed Alchemy, Its Science and Romance from
the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Margaret Alice Murray, 58, anthropologist and historian,
born in Calcutta, published The
Witch-Cult in Western Europe, the book that first argued for a widespread,
persecuted witchcraft religion in medieval times.
Marc
Aurel Stein, 59, Hungarian-born
archaeologist, naturalised as British, published an album of The Thousand Buddhas, Ancient Buddhist
Paintings from the Cave Temples of Tun-Huang on the Western Frontier of China
with his own notes and an introduction by Laurence Binyon.
Algernon Henry Blackwood, 62, collaborating with a friend,
Wilfred Wilson, published The Wolves of
God and Other Fey Stories, a collection of fifteen tales of the supernatural
and visionary.
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, M. D. LL.D., 62, issued (with
Mme Dunglas Home), D D Home, His Life and
Mission, a biography of a noted psychic.
Ernest Percival Rhys, 62, who grew up in Carmarthen, poet,
memoirist and editor of the Everyman’s Library issued The Haunters and the Haunted, an anthology of ghost stories.
Arthur Edward Waite, 64, an American-born mystic, poet and
occult scholar long resident in England, published A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry.
Helen Alexandrina Dallas, 65, born in India, psychic
researcher and contributor to the spiritualist journal Light, published Communion
and Fellowship: A Manual Dedicated to Those Who Have Passed beyond the Veil.
Henry Rider Haggard, 65, author of occult romances,
published She and Allan, in which his
explorer Allan Quatermain meets the enchantress Ayesha at the ancient city of
Kôr.
Marie Corelli, the pen-name of Marie Mackay, 66, novelist
and resident of Stratford-upon-Avon, published The Secret Power: a Romance of the Time, a futuristic novel of
spaceships and strange rays and forces. Her work was extremely popular in late
Victorian times.
Annie Besant, 74, theosophist, social reformer, from
Clapham, published Talks With a Class,
discussions of the after-life, the secret masters, mystical experiences and
higher planes of thought.
Cecily Kent issued Telling
Fortunes By Cards and Fortune-Telling
By Tea Leaves. She may also be the fortune-teller who issued similar books
as ‘Minetta’, but is otherwise so far unidentified.
Ralph Holbrook Keen issued The Little Ape & Others, a book of sardonic prose pieces with
Yellow-Bookery decorations by John Austen. Apart from a poem, ‘The Well of
Tears’, in The Path, vol 4, August, 1913, a theosophical
journal, and a satirical verse, ‘Battle’
(‘After certain very modern Poets’), in Coterie,
Winter, 1920-21, no's 6 and 7, the Xmas Double Number, little else seems known
of him.
(Mark Valentine)