The Curse of the Wise Woman

By Lord Dunsany and Darrell Schweitzer

In the 1890s, a motherless teenager whose father has been forced to flee the country is left in charge of the family estates. He uses his freedom to indulge his love of field sports, focusing especially on wildfowl-shooting on a nearby peat bog. When he discovers the bog is threatened by an industrial peat-cutting syndicate, he finds no effective ally—except an old woman who believes herself to be a wise woman—or witch!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781479473823

Lord Dunsany

Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) was a British writer. Born in London, Dunsany—whose name was Edward Plunkett—was raised in a prominent Anglo-Irish family alongside a younger brother. When his father died in 1899, he received the title of Lord Dunsany and moved to Dunsany Castle in 1901. He met Lady Beatrice Child Villiers two years later, and they married in 1904. They were central figures in the social spheres of Dublin and London, donating generously to the Abbey Theatre while forging friendships with W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and George William Russell. In 1905, he published The Gods of Pegāna, a collection of fantasy stories, launching his career as a leading figure in the Irish Literary Revival. Subsequent collections, such as A Dreamer’s Tales (1910) and The Book of Wonder (1912), would influence generations of writers, including J. R. R. Tolkein, Ursula K. Le Guin, and H. P. Lovecraft. In addition to his pioneering work in the fantasy and science fiction genres, Dunsany was a successful dramatist and poet. His works have been staged and adapted for theatre, radio, television, and cinema, and he was unsuccessfully nominated for the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature.