The Woman Who Invented “Dark Fantasy.” How Gertrude Barrows Bennett Popularized the Fantastic

Imagine it. A dystopian government maintains power over the downtrodden population of a post-apocalyptic United States through a system of deadly games. Exposure to a strange new element gives an average young man superstrength. Invisible predators from an alternate dimension feed on human evil. A hardy young adventurer forges telepathic connections with a living world to oppose the forces that would brutally exploit them both. And then there are realities that turn out to be nothing more than mere illusions, the projections of angry and excited minds—or just perhaps, a nagging voice inside us insists, they might be real after all….

These are the dreams that contemporary culture is made of, fueling everything from Hollywood blockbusters to groundbreaking video games and prize-winning literary experiments. And, incredibly, they are all story forms popularized by pioneering genre author Gertrude Mabel Barrows Bennett, who wrote (primarily under the pen name Francis Stevens) in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Although she is often celebrated as “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” the range of Bennett’s groundbreaking stories—produced largely in a six-year period—suggests that she is better understood as the mother of modern genre fiction writ large. Using tales about the clash of alternate worlds and values to reassess scientific ideas and social relations emerging at the turn of the twentieth century (many of which are still very relevant), she innovated in speculative subgenres including but not limited to: the dark fantasy, the parallel worlds story, the superhero origin tale, and the feminist eco-utopia.

Gertrude Barrows was born in 1884, in Minneapolis. She grew up writing poetry and short prose pieces and dreaming of a career as an illustrator. After completing eighth grade, she left school to help support her family but continued to take night classes while working as a department store secretary. In 1904, at the age of 17, she made her literary debut with a short story that appeared in Argosy, the premiere all-story magazine of the era. An adventure writer attracted to adventurers, in 1909 Barrows met and married Stewart Bennett, a British journalist and treasurer hunter, and moved with him to Philadelphia. The two separated while Bennett was pregnant, and their marriage was formally terminated by her husband’s death in the Florida Keys a year later. Remaining in Philadelphia, Bennett supported her small family as a journalist and secretary at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bennett returned to writing in the late 1910s under a set of conditions that will feel all too familiar to many modern people, especially women: It was one of the few jobs she could do from home while raising her daughter and caring for her ailing mother during a global flu pandemic with minimal social services. She immediately sold several stories to Argosy and its sister publication, All-Story Weekly. Bennett requested that her work be published under the gender-neutral pseudonym “Jean Veil” but editor Robert H. Davis assigned her the masculine “Francis Stevens” instead. She decided to maintain the Stevens pseudonym upon positive reception of her stories by fans, who celebrated her “unsurpassed” ability to create “pure imaginative fantasy” that was “refreshing” in its originality and “exquisite” in its sense of humor.

Between 1917 and 1923, Bennett sold five novels and seven short stories to premium venues including Argosy, All-Story, and People’s Favorite Magazine; her last publication appeared in one of the first issues of Weird Tales, the magazine that would set the standards for modern fantasy and horror fiction. After the pandemic ended, her mother passed away, and her daughter got engaged, Bennett returned to her adventuring ways, exchanging Philadelphia and her writing career for a new life in California; she remained there until her death in 1949.

Like many science fiction authors today, Bennett spent a great deal of time in research—up to seven months for her novel-length works—before drafting her stories. Given her work as a journalist in a major American city and as a secretary at a university known for its cutting-edge zoology, biology, and archeology programs, it is no surprise that Bennett’s stories seem ripped from the headlines of her day.

This is especially true of The Heads of Cerberus, whose dystopian future Philadelphia invokes the Tammany Hall scandals in which Democratic leaders publicly positioned themselves as progressive, working-class reformers while privately encouraging administrative corruption to consolidate their power. At the same time, Bennett’s depiction of future Philadelphia as a world analogous to our own but separated in time and space by an interdimensional portal echoes mathematician and science fiction author Charles Howard Hinton’s ideas about parallel worlds and the fourth dimension, as explored in The Fourth Dimension (1904) and An Episode of Flatland (1907).

Indeed, Bennett’s entire literary output is characterized by creative engagement with early twentieth-century America’s scientific and social obsessions. Her earliest work, 1904’s “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar,” revolves around the discovery of a powerful element called “stellarite” and was published just one year after Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking work in radioactivity, which included the discovery of polonium and radium. Later stories such as “Unseen—Unfeared” (1919) and “Behind the Curtain” (1918) extrapolate from well-publicized scientific accomplishments including the development of infrared photography in 1910 and the Egyptology craze of the early twentieth century (indeed, the University of Pennsylvania launched several major expeditions to Egypt during this period). Meanwhile, 1918’s future-oriented feminist sea story, “Friend Island,” appeared just one year after Loretta Walsh became the first woman to join the US Navy and the same year that Genevieve and Lucille Baker and Myrtle Hazard became the first enlisted women in the US Coast Guard.

Bennett was first and foremost a teller of entertaining tales who engaged with the most popular genre traditions of her day. Along with its political and scientific extrapolation, The Heads of Cerberus engages in literary extrapolation, paying homage to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) with its concluding image of a shadowy time traveler who may be responsible for dystopian future Philadelphia—all the while exploring how time might run differently in the various worlds created by such travelers. Indeed, Bennett’s editors directly compared her to the British literary phenom.

The preview for “Friend Island” notes that tales set in the future are common and Wells “has had more than one try at the game,” but tantalizingly promises that readers will prefer the story at hand due to the author’s “happy combination” of “imagination” and “bubbling…humor.” Readers also likely noticed that Bennett’s subtitle, “A Veracious Tale of an Ancient Mariness,” pays homage to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”…while the story itself wittily transforms the poet’s depiction of nature as feminine, mysterious, and hostile to human reason into a specifically masculine misperception. Elsewhere, Bennett’s editors placed her in the emergent pantheon of American speculative superstars, noting that “Behind the Curtain” invokes Edgar Allan Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado,” but “is a lot better than Poe’s story, if we do say it.”

When Bennett was not advancing established story forms, she was creating them. Published just one year after Baroness Emma Orczy’s wildly popular stage play about a masked avenger called the Scarlet Pimpernel, “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” was one of the first modern superhero stories and a template for one of America’s favorite comic-book tropes: the lab-invented superman. Fifteen years later, Bennett’s depiction of elves (in “The Elf-Trap”) as human-sized immortals characterized by their “delicate, fascinating beauty” and magical silversmithing abilities would radically transform conventional Victorian depictions of such creatures as miniscule, childish imps. As such, her characters anticipate the rise of the modern fantasy elf popularized by Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955).

Contemporary readers, like their early twentieth-century counterparts, will appreciate Bennett’s ability to turn “all the cliches of the hour into a rollicking good laugh”—especially as such cliches are related to gender. For example, “Friend Island” imagines a happy, high-tech matriarchal future where Nature literally rains both silly and serious misfortunes down upon men who refuse to treat her like the dignified lady that the story’s swashbuckling, macaroon-consuming woman adventurer knows her to be. The Heads of Cerberus provides a more uneven but also more provocative exploration of gender and genre, depicting seventeen-year-old protagonist Viola as both a conventional object of sexual desire and as a sharp-shooting girl genius who regularly outthinks and outacts the older and decidedly less intelligent men around her.

Meanwhile, Viola’s antagonist, the Philadelphian leader Loveliest, has strange encounters with both the natural aging process and unnatural visitors from the past that prompt her to suspect she is being used by men to preserve the dystopian status quo of her world—in other words, that she is what feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ would later call “a female man.” Moreover, Viola’s concluding realization that Loveliest might be a “distinct reflection” of herself leaves readers wondering what we can do in our own present to prevent ourselves from becoming such creatures and upholding a status quo every bit as problematic as that of Bennett’s future Philadelphia.

To a lesser extent, the stories in this anthology also upend racial stereotypes common to early twentieth-century culture. “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” invokes both Yellow Peril rhetoric and long-standing generic ideals about the mad scientist as ethnic other in its depiction of the half-Japanese Lawrence—a “fantastic vision from the Orient,” complete with a “little, weazened body” and “slanted” black eyes that evince “a great deal of scorn for all [Western] doctors.” In the end, however, Lawrence emerges as an eccentric but likable scientist “possessed of strange depths” who combats both social and scientific ignorance in his quest for knowledge—much like the decidedly white, Western scientist-heroes populating Wells’ own early science fiction.

In “Unseen—Unfeared,” Bennett’s white, liberal protagonist finds himself overwhelmed by a sudden hatred for Philadelphia’s African American, Italian, and Jewish communities, which transform from lively if “shabby” neighborhoods to “unhygienic…[and] revolting” slums before his very eyes. His subsequent quest to make sense of this experience allows Bennett to thrill her audience with a proto-Lovecraftian vision of a predatory universe while challenging their assumptions about xenophobia as a natural aspect of Darwinian competition between species (and races).

Bennett spent her formative years in Minneapolis and Philadelphia, cities with established Asian, Mediterranean, and Black populations that were home to some of the nation’s first attempts at racial integration. Little wonder, then, that she sometimes allows her racial others to speak for themselves, or that she interrogates the roots of white racism. This is not to say, however, that her racial sensitivity did not have its limits. With the notable exception of the very early “Thomas Dunbar,” Bennett relegated characters of color to minor positions in her stories, and she remained susceptible to stereotypes about newer immigrant groups such as Eastern Europeans.

This is particularly evident in “The Elf-Trap,” where the “Negro caretaker” Jake is treated with respect by the narrator and protagonist, but the brilliant, beautiful elves who disguise themselves as Romani are perceived by humans as “dirty and villainous of feature.” Even if readers understand that the elves are manipulating human stereotypes to preserve their kingdom from human incursion, the stereotypes themselves are never put into question.

Modern readers might find themselves both tantalized and frustrated by Bennett’s tendency to advance scientific and social critique in one paragraph, only to abandon it in the next. This interpretive openness was baked into the family-oriented all-story magazines in which Bennett published, and she was an early master of the form. The Heads of Cerberus very much revolves around such openness, offering readers four possible interpretations of the novel’s events: either our protagonists are the first to travel through time and space; or they are following in the steps of a shadowy time traveler mysteriously changing history as he roams through the astral planes; or they have encountered a “twisted” version of Philadelphia created by one of the “forces that rule” the fourth dimension “for its own sardonic amusement”; or the dust they inhaled caused them to hallucinate the whole adventure.

Open endings are central to Bennett’s shorter fiction as well: “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” allows readers to wonder if Lawrence is mad, heroic, or both; if his alienation from the American status quo is an innate characteristic of the scientist or a product of American white supremacy; and if he will abandon or mentor newly minted superhero Thomas Dunbar. At the end of “Unseen—Unfeared,” both Bennett’s protagonist and readers are left wondering if humankind’s racism is innate or implanted by alien forces—and if the narrator in fact encountered aliens, or if it was all a drug-induced hallucination. Likewise, in its exploration of art, science, and perception, “The Elf-Trap” leaves its audience asking if our protagonist’s keen observational skills are what allow him to see magic or if his close study of microscopic worlds has driven him insane—just as we wonder, in the concluding pages, whether he is truly dead or has been translated to another world entirely.

Bennett does not give us clear answers to the question of “What world am I in?” and indeed, her stories seem to support all options equally well. Instead, she asks us to answer a much harder question: How do I proceed, regardless of what world I am in? Which is to say: How might my experience of new worlds change my opinions about the “real” world…and impel me to work towards winning a better one in my own future?

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Excerpted from The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories by Francis Stevens, edited and introduced by Lisa Yaszek. Published by The MIT Press. Copyright © 2024 MIT. All rights reserved.