<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Francis Stevens (pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883-1948). The first major American woman writer of fantasy and science fiction, Gertrude Mabel Barrows Bennett was born in Minneapolis. She left school after the eighth grade and worked as a stenographer while taking night courses to become an illustrator (although she never achieved that goal). At the age of 17 she wrote her first story, although it was not published until later. In 1909 she married a Briton, Stewart Bennett, who was a journalist and explorer; the couple moved to Philadelphia. In 1910 her husband died on an expedition, leaving her with a new-born daughter. Bennett continued to work as a stenographer until her father died around 1916, leaving her in charge of an ailing, dependent mother.

At this point she began to write full time, producing a string of highly acclaimed novels and shorter stories. After her mother died, apparently in 1920, she stopped writing and took full-time employment. In the mid-1920s she moved to California, where she died in 1948. (Because she had become estranged from her only daughter, it was long thought that Bennett died around 1939 -- the last year in which her daughter received a letter from her.) Bennett's work makes for creaky reading today, although her work was often so original and influential that it remains interesting, and not just to devotees of the adventure fantasies published in the Munsey magazines in the World War I era.

Writing Career

Bennett's first major story, the short novel The Nightmare appeared in All-Story Weekly in 1917. The Nightmare in many regards resembles Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land that Time Forgot (first published in magazine form in 1918) and probably influenced Burroughs. The novel is set on an island in which evolution has taken a unique course, and on which the main character finds himself after having survived the sinking of the Lusitania by the German navy (an incident that helped propel the U.S. into the First World War).

Bennett's second novella, "The Labyrinth" is a mystery bearing an impasto of the fantastic (a form which probably reached its greatest popularity in Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (1910); it is the only one of her stories set in a thinly fictionalized Minneapolis (called "Marshall City" in this instance). Her short story Friend Island (All-Story Weekly, 1918) is her only clearly feminist work, being set in a 22nd century ruled by women. Probably her most successful short work is the novella "Serapion" (Argosy, 1920), a dark fantasy of a man's possession by a supernatural entity. These stories (and several others) were recently collected for the first time in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

Bennett's reputation rests most strongly on three of her novels: The Citadel of Fear (Argosy, 1918; reprinted in book form in 1970), The Heads of Cerberus (Thrill Book, 1919; reprinted 1952) and Claimed (Argosy, 1920; reprinted 1966). Citadel of Fear is a classical lost-race story of the World War I period, and its evocation of a forgotten city of the Aztecs in central Mexico is one of Bennett's best achievements as a writer.

Her most influential work of science fiction is undoubtedly The Heads of Cerberus. It was the first of her works to achieve book publication, and the 1952 edition of the novel contained an introduction that revealed for the first time that "Francis Stevens" was the pen-name of a woman. Heads of Cerberus is the first alternate worlds story, in which people from 20th-century America stumble into a timeline in which America is controlled by a dictatorship. One of the first dystopian novels ever written, the novel is also an early example of what became known in the 1950s as "social science fiction" (perhaps best exemplified by The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth 1953).

Probably her best novel is the supernatural fantasy Claimed, in which an artifact sacred to the ancient god of the oceans summons that deity to the New Jersey shore in the early 20th century. Although tarnished by a hackneyed love sub-plot, the scenes in which the deity materializes and projects a vision of the sinking of Atlantis earned the novel praise by H. P. Lovecraft . Bennett seems to have wielded some influence over Lovecraft and A. Merritt. Lovecraft's early stories in the style of Lord Dunsany seem to owe some of their settings to her, and the brash American adventurers in Merritt's later novels appear to draw some inspiration from "Francis Stevens" in general, and The Citadel of Fear in particular. In fact, during the height of her success, it was rumored that "Francis Stevens" was in fact a pseudonym of Merritt's, and it was only the publication of Citadel of Fear in 1952, with its biographical introduction by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, that firmly quelled that rumor.