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Elizabeth Myers,
author of A Well Full of Leaves, The Basilisk of St James, and Mrs
Christopher also
published two volumes of short stories. This new selection gathers together the
best of these as well as several previously uncollected stories.
 By the time of her early
death in 1947 at the age of 34, Elizabeth Myers had already made her mark on
the literary scene with three published novels. The first of these, A Well
Full of Leaves, appeared in 1943 and made an instantaneous impact. With its
somewhat rhapsodic blend of nature mysticism and individualistic Catholicism,
this story of four young siblings from a harsh domestic background polarized
critical opinion but also won popular acclaim, proving an inspiration for many
ordinary readers as war still raged around them. Later that same year, Myers
met and married Littleton Powys, the retired headmaster of Sherborne Prep who
was 40 years her senior, having had an introduction from his old friend Arthur
Waugh. Despite her fragile health – at 25 she had lost her hearing in one ear
and had been diagnosed with tuberculosis – the few years she spent with
Littleton were happy and productive. Her second book, The Basilisk of
St. James, a novel about Jonathan Swift set in the London of Queen Anne,
was published in 1945 and though less commercially successful gained its share
of critical attention. It was quickly followed in 1946 by Mrs. Christopher,
an original murder story that plays on the psychological aspects of the nature
of good and evil, and that was made into film five years later, starring Dirk
Bogarde, Fay Compton and Michael Gough.
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TWENTY-THREE TALES
by ELIZABETH MYERS
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‘I believe that a story should strike a
reader on the heart, like a blow from a stick.’ – Elizabeth Myers
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TWENTY-THREE TALES
by Elizabeth
Myers
An excerpt from the
Introduction by Anthony Head:
 This new
selection of her work brings together 23 of the most diverse and incisive of
her stories – a mixture of the comic, the sentimental, the pathetic and the
tragic. It includes her only American story, ‘The Plea’; one of her few
non-contemporary tales, ‘Dawn’, set in the wake of the French Revolution; and
three that were not included in either of her main collections – ‘The Money
Changeling’, an absurd kind of ‘revenger’s comedy’, the slapstick ‘Lost in
London’, and ‘One Night “Up West”’, which like many of her tales packs a punch
to startling effect. Most have a London or Irish setting (despite her never
having visited Ireland, she was told many a tale by her Irish great-aunt), and
the slang she employs in them is that of the contemporary East End or the Irish
lower classes – dated somewhat in places but not difficult to understand.
Underlying her narratives, and underlining her purpose in
them, is the redemptive power of forgiveness, of mercy as twice blessed. Myers
deserves to be remembered not specifically as a Christian writer, but first and
foremost as a humanist, an author who could dispense with the dogmatic baggage
of her religion whilst proclaiming its life-affirming message of compassion. As
the narrator of ‘Nuts’ puts it: ‘Hatred and crime are, after all, only the
result of not enough love.’ Elizabeth Myers had a capacious understanding of
human nature and a broad tolerance of human foibles. Her unique stories are
indeed, as her earlier publisher noted, ‘products of a perspicacious mind and a
generous heart.’ However they may strike the reader’s emotions, they will not
be easily dislodged from the mind.
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Contemporary reviews:
“Elizabeth Myers’s stories are surely the
fine flower of her genius. They possess all the qualifications necessary to
good story-writing: humour, tenderness, pathos, a deep understanding of all
living creatures, and above all, poetry.’— Gloucestershire Echo.
“Invaluable in adding to our knowledge of this
gifted writer. Her fantasy is always sensibly well-earthed, her realism that of
the visionary, and her spry cockney children are creations of the first
order.”— (John O’London’s Weekly).
“From this remarkable collection of stories. the
reader will gain not only satisfaction and pleasure but a high regard for a
woman with a heart and a brain.”— The Countryman.
“They’re as alive as a basket of eels.”— Charles
Causley (BBC)
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Forthcoming in autumn 2021
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MRS CHRISTOPHER
by Elizabeth Myers
Published in 1946, Mrs. Christopher,
an original murder story that plays on the psychological aspects of the nature
of good and evil, was made into film five years later, under the title of Blackmailed, starring Dirk
Bogarde, Fay Compton and Michael Gough. |
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