S02E40 The Lost Tragedy by Denis Mackail

A comic ghost story from Edwardian London–perfect to relax to and not scary at all. The Lost Tragedy by Denis Mackail Denis Mackail was born in 1892  in London. His mother was the daughter of the famous pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones.  His father was Scottish, born on the Isle of Bute, and later Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and a specialist in Latin Literature and also President of the British Academy.  His sister was also a novelist. He was more distantly related to Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, a British prime minister. Denis Mackail was born into some privilege. His most famous novel Greenery Street deals with social manners in the upper-middle class London he knew. As such, this story is interesting as it deals with the doings of lower middle class tradesmen such as book-dealers.  Mackail must have known something of the trade to paint it so well. Mackail suffered from ill-health when he was a young man and though he worked as a stage-set designer in the theatre in London, he was not fit enough to fight in the First World War.  I am not clear what his physical health problems were but he suffered from anxiety himself and had what is called a ‘nervous breakdown.’ Despite his comfortable early start he had some financial troubles and had to write to supplement his income. He published a novel every year from 1920 until 1938. He moved in literary circles and was a friend of A A Milne and P G Wodehouse, both famous for their light-hearted and comic writing.  He wrote the official biography of J M Barrie (the author of Peter Pan) and but after the death of his wife in 1949 he never wrote another thing. Despite that he lived another twenty-two years, dying in London in 1971 at the age of seventy-nine. Genre expectations. Writers can expect to get excoriated if they defy genre expectations. If you write a Romance be that clean or mucky (I don’t really read either to be honest)  or Space Opera that is not huge in scale, or Heaven Forbid ‘LitRPG’