The Black Mirror

Johnny Mains is a British Fantasy Award-winning editor and genre researcher. He was Project Editor on the 2010 re-issue of The Pan Book of Horror Stories, created the critically acclaimed series Dead Funny: Horror Stories by Comedians (co-edited with Robin Ince) and has spent the last five years deep in the archives, uncovering ‘lost’ stories by notable authors such as Edith Nesbit, Algernon Blackwood, Oscar Cook and Daphne Du Maurier, among others.

Compared to Charlotte Brontë during her lifetime, Winifred Duke (1890-1962) was a prolific author, writing both fiction and books on Scottish history and the legal system from the early 1920s through to the mid-1950s. By the late 1940s, though, she’d become fascinated by the way that eras entwined, and how the effects of something that happened in the past could still echo loudly – and devastatingly – in the present, themes she explores in both 1948’s The Black Mirror and Dirge for a Dead Witch, which was published the following year.