Hold on–you are going to say–Lovecraft is known for having very few female characters! Remember, I was enclosed by academic conventions at the time, and the majority of the lauded writers were male, with their female characters being stereotypes and/or love interests. Lovecraft’s letters appeared to support my case, declaring: “There are certain standard stories invented before the dawn of history or later, which generations whisper about” including “Man changed to animal, diseases miraculously cured… vampire, dead man moving, ghost, premonitory warning of death &c.” ( Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja, 435).Īnother thing that appealed to me was Lovecraft’s references to women in his stories. I felt that these tales remained in the imagination long after the first reading and tapped into something in the collective unconscious. Motifs such as mysterious civilizations to be found under the sea in “The Temple” forbidden underground activity in “The Rats in the Walls”, together with long-lived/reincarnated sorcerers in “The Alchemist” and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” all fascinated me.

One thing that appealed to me about Lovecraft was his evocative ability which appeared to tap into Jungian archetypes. My assumption that as a ‘dead white male’ to quote the cliché, Lovecraft would be respected academically was incorrect, and instead he proved to be a controversial and polarizing figure. The project was approved, but the resident Gothic expert was unable to provide supervision, and I struggled along against a curtain of institutional resistance regarding texts associated with popular culture. I was studying English literature at Master’s level, around 1992/3, and in the realm of academia, historical writers were more acceptable research subjects than contemporary writers, so I approached the department about a project. At one stage I was a huge Stephen King fan, and I found a reference in King’s non-fiction work Danse Macabre to Lovecraft (see King, 1982:132-5).

My involvement with Lovecraft scholarship goes back some twenty-seven years.

All For Love by Cecelia Hopkins-Drewer