Overview

Prolific British writer Matthew Phipps Shiel (1865-1947) took his place with Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, and others as one of the most powerful authors of weird fiction in the early twentieth century. Born in the West Indies, Shiel moved to England in 1885 and soon began producing novels and tales, including the story collections Prince Zaleski (1895) and Shapes in the Fire (1896) and the novels The Purple Cloud (1901) and The Weird o' It (1902). To date, little has been known about Shiel's life. Harold Billings, a longtime librarian at the University of Texas, where many of Shiel's papers and manuscripts are housed, spent a lifetime writing an exhaustive biography, drawing upon Shiel's letters, accounts of him by friends and family, and other documents. He published portions of this biography in 2005 and 2010, but the complete work has not appeared until this edition. Here we find that Shiel was a flamboyant figure in Edwardian London. Married twice, Shiel was imprisoned for two years for having sexual relations with an underage girl (a relative of his second wife). Shiel also became notorious for claiming to be the king of Redonda, a small island in the West Indies. Billings chronicles his association with Arthur Machen, John Gawsworth, and other literary figures of the time. Hippocampus Press is proud to publish this authoritative biography of a celebrated weird writer whose life and work deserves to be better known.

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