Earlier today in the library I found the archives of an old fictional magazine called Blackwood that ran from 1817 to 1980, a hidden gem stored in the remotest corner of the vast room. I looked it up and apparently it printed a lot of horror fiction that inspired the likes of Shelley, Coleridge, Dickens, Bronte and Poe, which made me feel pretty stupid for never having heard of it before. It’s also the same magazine that printed the first version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899 issue, still hunting for this one). Although I couldn’t find any popular names in the version I picked up, it contained some of the most fascinating short stories I’ve ever read, and I ended up spending the entire afternoon sprawled across the floor, powering through the works of some obscure writers who probably never expected a 20 year old girl from India to be reading them an entire century later. It felt so strange and wonderful to realize that, all those years ago, some of the greatest writers I know were reading the exact same words and finding inspiration from it. 

Lady Hazel Martyn Lavery (1880-1935) dressed as Flora in Botticelli’s painting, The Spring, Glass negative, ca. 1925, George Grantham Bain Collection