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.
Publisher’s Preface
The present work was written by Harold Billings (1931–2017), a distinguished librarian who work at the library of the University of Texas at Austin for nearly fifty years (1954–2003), culminating in his appointment as Director of General Libraries (1978–2003). His articles on library science were collected in the volume Magic and Hypersystems: Constructing the Information Sharing Library (2002). In 2003 he received the Hugh C. Atkinson Award from the American Library Association.
But for devotees of weird fiction, Billings is best known for his tireless work in gathering up documents relating to M. P. Shiel, many of them obtained from Shiel’s literary executor John Gawsworth, and depositing them in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Using this material, Billings wrote two volumes of a biography, M. P. Shiel: A Biography of His Early Years (2005) and M. P. Shiel: The Middle Years 1897–1923 (2010), published by Roger Beacham, Publisher (Austin). He was unable to complete the third and final volume, and the extensive notes for it were published as An Ossuary for M. P. Shiel: The Final Years, 1923–1947 (Bucharest: Mount Abraxas/Ex Occidente, 2016).
Hippocampus Press is proud to publish this biography in a single volume. We have made some modest revisions—such as the placement of separate introductions to each volume at the beginning of the book—to facilitate reading, and we have also consolidated the bibliographical references and placed them at the end of the volume. We hope that this omnibus edition of a landmark biography will foster interest and scholarship on a neglected master of weird fiction and also demonstrate Harold Billings’s lifelong scholarship on and devotion to M. P. Shiel.
