About the Author: Oliver Onions
Oliver Onions was born in Bradford in 1873. Although he legally changed his name to George Oliver in 1918, he always published under the name Oliver Onions. Onions originally worked as a commercial artist before turning to writing, and the dust jackets of his earliest works included illustrations painted by Onions himself.
Onions was a prolific writer of short stories and novels and is best remembered today for his ghost stories, the most famous of which is probably ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, originally published in Widdershins (1911). Despite being known today chiefly for his supernatural short fiction, Onions also published more than a dozen novels in a variety of genres, including In Accordance with the Evidence (1912), The Tower of Oblivion (1921), The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939), The Story of Ragged Robyn (1945), and Poor Man's Tapestry (1946), which won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize as the best work of fiction published that year.
Onions was apparently a very private individual, and though admired and well-respected in his time, he appears not to have moved in literary circles, and few personal memoirs of him survive. He spent most of his later life in Wales, where he lived with his wife, Berta Ruck (1878-1978), herself a prolific and popular novelist; they had two sons, Arthur (b. 1912) and William (b. 1913). Oliver Onions died in 1961.
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Oliver Onions
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Paperback, Published in Mar 2006 by Wildside Press
ISBN10: 0809500310 | ISBN13: 9780809500314
Page count: 92
The Beckoning Fair One is sometimes called the greatest ghost story in the English language; it may well be. Certainly it is one of the questest and most beautiful supernatural tales ever written. It reminds the reader of Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" -- and that is huge praise indeed. The story tells of British novelist Paul Oleron, who lives restlessly in cramped quarters, looking -- as writers do -- for some way not to work on the project at hand. That is when he sees a vast and beautiful old house for rent. He takes the first floor and moves in. When his friend Elsie Benbough comes to visit, weirdness begins. The house, it seems, does not like Elsie and begins to inflict minor but mean-spirited injuries upon her. Feeling the presence of something evil, she warns Oleron that he will never be able to work there. But Oleron is entranced . . . and then in love . . . and soon obsessed. . . .
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