The Villa and The Vortex

the long version

Elinor Mordaunt was the pen name of Evelyn May Clowes (1872-1942), a prolific and popular novelist and short story writer, working in Australia and Britain in the first thirty-five years of the twentieth century. Stories in The Villa and The Vortex include: The Villa’, in which death is brought into a Croatian mansion, but it’s not so easy to ask it to leave. ‘The Country-side’, in which a very ordinary infidelity demands the ultimate sacrifice. ‘Four wallpapers’, in which stripping off the wall coverings of a Spanish chateau re-enacts a family tragedy. ‘Hodge’ (previously published in Women’s Weird) in which two adolescents bring a prehistoric man into their own time, and their home.