ABSTRACT
The career of Algernon Blackwood extended for more than four decades, during which he established himself as a prolific and unique voice in British supernatural fiction. A critical event in Blackwood’s early life was a visit to Canada in 1887, a visit he repeated in 1890, as he hoped to start a dairy farm there. The venture failed, and Blackwood was forced to go to New York to earn a living as a journalist. Egypt—which Blackwood visited in 1912—became a central theme in Blackwood’s work at this time because its antiquity and its multiplicity of hybrid gods, mingling the human and the animal, underscored both his scorn of industrial civilization and his rejection of orthodox Christianity. Blackwood was, however, unable to duplicate this aesthetic triumph in subsequent children’s fantasies; and such novels as A Prisoner in Fairyland, The Extra Day, and The Fruit Stoners are all marred by sentimentality and a lack of distinctive imaginative touches.
