Mandylion Press

Ettie Stettheimer bares all in Love Days, inviting us into the Stettheimer family’s salon of avant-garde artists. Meet Ettie’s alter ego, Susanna Moore, a ravishing Greek scholar. Susanna has no trouble deciphering arcane texts, but when it comes to matters of the heart, she’s lost in translation. Her desire for love, knowledge, and the company of great artists takes her from New York to Berlin to Capri to Paris. She can only run from herself for so long. . . .

Henrietta “Ettie” Stettheimer (1875-1955) was a writer and one of the “Stetties,” a trio of artistic sisters who lived between Europe and New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With Carrie, the architect of an elaborate dollhouse, and Florine, a painter whose iconoclastic canvases have made their way into the modernist canon, Ettie hosted a salon frequented by the day’s avant garde. In a time when it was still unusual for women to pursue higher education, Ettie graduated from Barnard College in 1896, received a master’s degree at Columbia in 1898, and earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1908. Ettie published two novels, Philosophy: An Autobiographical Fragment and Love Days, under the pseudonym “Henrie Waste.”

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps paints a tragic portrait of Avis, a would-be artist whose promising career is subsumed by the obligations of marital life. Against the backdrop of the Civil War, Avis battles her conflicting desires: life with the man she loves or the pursuit of artistic greatness. Ultimately, instead of paints and palettes, Avis fills her days with thoughts of doilies and daycare. Following Avis’s struggles to balance her passion with her duties, Phelps proves that artistic ambition is not extinguished by love, but slowly eroded by the constraints of nineteenth-century womanhood.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911) was an incorrigible reformer, advocating at various points for dress reform, feminism, social reform, temperance, and an end to the practice of vivisection. In 1874, she penned a rousing call for women to burn their corsets, anticipating the bra-burning feminists of the following century. Her writing career began at 19, when she published a short story about the Civil War titled “A Sacrifice Consumed” in Harper’s Magazine. During her lifetime, she authored 57 volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays. She is perhaps best remembered for the trilogy of Spiritualist novels that she published in the wake of the Civil War—the first of which, The Gates Ajar, had sold 180,000 copies in the US and England by 1900.

Frances Bethune is desperate to lose weight before her husband’s return from India―in just two weeks. On the advice of a bad-breathed spirit, Frances undertakes a slenderizing séance. While she succeeds in her quest for thinness, she is horrified to discover that her discarded weight has taken on a new life of its own. Of this chilling, revolting tale, H.P. Lovecraft raved that Everett "reaches singular heights of spiritual terror." This new edition from Mandylion Press restores Everett’s 1907 masterpiece. It features an original introduction written by Mandylion cofounder Madeline Porsella, as well as a glossary that provides visual, material and affective image footnotes.

Henrietta Dorothy Everett (1851–1923) was born in Kent, England. Between 1896 and 1920, she published 22 books under the pen name Theo Douglas. She was an influential figure in the early days of science fiction and fantasy writing, and was cited in H.P. Lovecraft’s extended 1927 essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature."