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Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884-1948), writing as Francis Stevens, is often regarded as the founder of dark fantasy and was an influence on H.P. Lovecraft amongst many, with some ranking her alongside Mary Shelley in impact and imaginative power. Born Gertrude Barrows in Minneapolis, she married the English explorer Stewart Bennett in 1909. His death in the jungle just a year later left her alone with a baby daughter, and soon her elderly mother to look after too. Confined to her home by her carer's duties, she took to writing. Always an interest, it now became a profession. Her trailblazing fiction tended towards the dark and the dystopian: evil forces in a lost Aztec city in The Citadel of Fear (1918), a futuristic totalitarian Philadelphia in The Heads of Cerberus (1919) and an ominous atmosphere of dread in Claimed (1920). Melanie R. Anderson (introduction) is an assistant professor of English at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. She is the co-author of the Bram Stoker Award and Locus Award winning book Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction (Quirk Books, 2019) and the author of the academic book Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison (University of Tennessee Press, 2013). In addition to her academic research and teaching, she co-hosts two podcasts: The Know Fear Cast and the Monster, She Wrote Podcast.
