SPEAKER_00: Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica.
This month we're talking about women of science fiction.
These women inspire us to imagine impossible worlds, alien creatures, and fantastical inventions, revealing our deepest fears and hopes for the future.
In the wake of Frankenstein, out of the grasp of Cthulhu, before the world knew the likes
of lost civilizations or parallel universes.
For a few short years, a mysterious writer helmed a genre of eldritch tales.
They call her the mother of dark fantasy.
You may know her as Frances Stevens.
Today we're talking about the woman behind the pen name, Gertrude Barrows Bennett.
Gertrude hailed from humble beginnings. She was born in Minneapolis around 1883, the youngest daughter of Carrie and Charles Barrows.
Gertrude stopped her formal education in the eighth grade, but she enrolled in night school
to become an illustrator, and she kept learning at home.
Gertrude's older brothers studied sciences, and she watched them carefully, noting an
engineering method here, a biology term there, that would later find a place in her writing.
Young Gertrude's life was rife with tragedy.
Her father died in 1892, one brother died in 1896, and the other was dead by 1899.
Now living with her mother, Gertrude left school entirely to enter the workforce.
She was about 17 years old, working at a department store, when her first short story was published, The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar.
In it, a man wakes up after a car crash to find he's become a mad scientist's experiment.
He's left with super strength, the stuff of a modern-day superhero story.
After that, Gertrude published a few poems, but it's believed that she largely stopped writing for a few years.
Around 1909, she married Stuart Bennett, a British journalist and explorer.
Soon after, Gertrude gave birth to her only daughter, Josephine.
And then, tragedy struck once more.
Stuart was caught in a tropical storm off the coast of Florida while on a treasure hunting expedition.
He drowned, leaving Gertrude widowed, with a new baby and a sick mother to support.
And so Gertrude went back to what she knew best, writing.
She'd often lock herself in a room to churn out a draft, emerge, read the story aloud to Josephine, and edit from there.
In 1917, she sent off her first novella, titled The Nightmare, for publication.
It told the story of a man shipwrecked on an island completely cut off from the rest of the world, populated with strange creatures.
Gertrude had wanted to publish under the mysterious pen name Jean Vail, but for some reason her
editor published it under Frances Stevens.
Regardless, The Nightmare was a hit.
And so Frances Stevens stuck.
The next year, she published a serialized novel called The Citadel of Fear under the same pen name.
That story, about a forgotten Aztec city, was so well received that fans began to speculate that Frances Stevens was actually A. Merritt, a well-known sci-fi author writing under a
different name.
Not only did Merritt himself come out to set the record straight, but he praised Gertrude's work, counted himself among her readers, and said she influenced his writings.
The stories Gertrude wrote took place in lost worlds and dystopian futures.
She was an important figure early on in the dark fantasy genre, introducing readers to scenarios where humanity was always at the brink of extinction, where the world was always
at the precipice of eternal change.
In her work, she wove together legends from Greek mythology or classic poems with modern anxieties.
And most importantly, she brought her own fascination with dark and nightmarish elements to her tales.
Gertrude's parallel universes, sentient forces of nature, visits from the underworld, and societies with swap gender roles made her stories well-loved for decades to come.
Though Gertrude put down her pen in 1923, and with the end of Frances Stevens came the
documented end of Gertrude Barrow's Bennett as well.
Gertrude's mother died in 1920.
By the middle of the decade, Gertrude had left Josephine in the care of friends.
It's possible that once on her own, Gertrude saw an opportunity to find work outside of the home and stopped writing.
She likely moved west.
A death certificate recorded her dying in 1948.
Though her given name isn't well known, Gertrude was a giant among pulp writers of her era.
She was a monumental influence on the works of contemporary authors and on the creation of a darker sort of fantasy.
She was a singular mind, a lover of the bizarre and new.
As Gertrude herself once wrote looking back on her first published work,
I had just one merit as I remember it, and that was a rather grotesque originality.
All month we're talking about women in science fiction. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram at Womanica Podcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!
