Eleanor M. Hartley – författare

A man attends a seance in a Hampstead drawing room and by the next chapter is on a planet under a double sun, where every landscape strips away another consolation. Lindsay sold fewer than six hundred copies in his lifetime and died believing he had failed; C. S. Lewis took the machinery for his own space trilogy, and Harold Bloom called this the book he most wished he had written.

An English novelist takes a villa in the Italian lakes to write, and finds his neighbor is a duchess, his gardener's daughter is not what she seems, and the local cardinal has a snuff-box and an eye for a plot. Harland edited The Yellow Book, the quarterly that defined the 1890s and then buried them; this sunlit comedy was his bestseller and the opposite of everything he had published.

An orphaned Englishman refuses his uncles' patronage, takes a clerkship in Brussels, and teaches at a girls' school run by a directress who has decided to marry him. Charlotte Bronte wrote it first and could not place it - publisher after publisher declined; it appeared only after her death, by which time she had used the same Brussels material to far greater effect elsewhere. Read it for the plain, cold voice she never used again.

A portrait keeps the marks of a life its subject refuses to carry: the sins, the years, the cruelty. Wilde's only novel was cut by his publisher, attacked as immoral, and read aloud in court at his trial, where the prosecution treated the fiction as a confession. Beneath the epigrams it is a severe book about what a beautiful surface costs.

A dozen Catholic priests on holiday in Rome sit up after dinner and tell each other, as professionals, what they have actually met: a possession, a house that will not be blessed, a deathbed that went wrong. Benson was the Archbishop of Canterbury's son, and his conversion to Rome in 1903 was a public scandal; here he uses the priest's clinical tone to make the supernatural sound like case notes.

An Eastern writer of Western stories, told he has never seen the West, goes to Montana to gather material and is put to work punching cows by men who know exactly what he is. Bower was Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, and the initials were deliberate - readers assumed for years that the creator of the Flying U outfit was a man. She had lived it, which is the joke and the point.

A pretty American girl in Switzerland walks out alone with an Italian and cannot see why the expatriate ladies stop calling. James called it a study, and studied exactly one question: whether she is innocent or careless, and whether the difference matters to a society that has already decided. It made him famous and offended half of Boston.

A professor of geology, a retired general, and a young engineer sit on a hot veranda west of the Rockies arguing about the sea that used to be there - and out in the desert is a mine called the Golden Fleece, a relic said to be Montezuma's, and a woman who knows more about both than she says. Julian Hawthorne grew up among Emerson, Thoreau and Melville, wrote some fifty books, and later went to prison for mail fraud over a mining stock - which lends this treasure romance of 1892 an edge he did not plan.