The Outcast and The Rite

Melissa Edmundson is a literary historian, interested in 19th and 20th-century British women writers, ghost stories, the supernatural, the Gothic, and Anglo-Indian popular fiction (not always in that order!).

Helen de Guerry Simpson was born in Sydney, New South Wales, in 1897, and studied at Oxford. Her novel Boomerang won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1932. She died from cancer in 1940. Her close friend, the novelist Margaret Kennedy, took charge of Simpson’s daughter Clemence during the war while Simpson was in her last illness