Welcome to a series on Irish writers of the fantastic. Over the next few months Swan River Press will be taking us on a tour through Ireland’s fantasy heritage.
“Only the dead are faithful to Love—because they are dead,” she said. “The living live on—and forget!”
– A Vanished Hand (1914)
Clotilde Graves (1863-1932) was born in the Buttevant Barracks, Co. Cork on 3 June 1863. At the age of nine, Graves’s family moved to England. She worked briefly in the British Museum while studying at the Royal Female School of Art in Bloomsbury. Often unconventional and uncompromising, Graves adopted male dress and smoked in public, both frowned upon at the time. With the intention of becoming a playwright, Graves worked as a travelling actor to learn the craft. This she did, and between 1887 and 1913 she had sixteen plays produced in London and New York. Under the pen-name “Richard Dehan”, used to differentiate from her dramatic output, she also wrote historical novels as well as stories for periodicals such as Gentlewoman, World, and Judy. Graves retired in 1928 to a convent in Hatch End, Middlesex, where she died on 3 December 1932. Her short story collections include The Cost of Wings (1914), Off Sandy Hook (1915), Under the Hermés (1917), and The Eve of Pascua (1920).
Read Clotilde Graves (Richard Dehan) at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/33039
