Today we’re celebrating Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a pioneering science fiction writer who used the pseudonym Francis Stevens. She has been called “the woman who invented dark fantasy.”
From wikipedia:
Bennett wrote her first short story at age 17, a science fiction story titled “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar”. She mailed the story to Argosy, then one of the top pulp magazines. The story was accepted and published in the March 1904 issue.
Once Bennett began to take care of her mother, she decided to return to fiction writing as a means of supporting her family. The first story she completed after her return to writing was the novella “The Nightmare,” which appeared in All-Story Weekly in 1917. The story is set on an island separated from the rest of the world, on which evolution has taken a different course. “The Nightmare” resembles Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ The Land That Time Forgot, itself published a year later.[3] While Bennett had submitted “The Nightmare” under her own name, she had asked to use a pseudonym if it was published. The magazine’s editor chose not to use the pseudonym Bennett suggested (Jean Vail) and instead credited the story to Francis Stevens. When readers responded positively to the story, Bennett chose to continue writing under the name.
Over the next few years, Bennett wrote a number of short stories and novellas. Her short story “Friend Island” (All-Story Weekly, 1918), for example, is set in a 22nd-century ruled by women. Another story is the novella “Serapion” (Argosy, 1920), about a man possessed by a supernatural creature. This story has been released in an electronic book entitled Possessed: A Tale of the Demon Serapion, with three other stories by her. Many of her short stories have been collected in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (University of Nebraska Press, 2004).