A Seventh Child ~ John Strange Winter ~ New Edition

I am very pleased to announce that A Seventh Child: A Novel by John Strange Winter (aka Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Stannard), originally published in 1894, is now available in a lovely new edition, and it includes a long biographical essay by me entitled 'John Strange Winter: Author, Wife, Mother & Purveyor of Toilet Preparations’. 

It seemed very fitting that this should be the book I worked on after Through the Night: Tales of Shades and Shadows by Isabella Banks; Henrietta and Isabella were good friends. 

I wrote a blog post about this volume in 2020, and you can read it by clicking here.

You can pre-order it directly from Nezu Press by clicking here. Or you can pre-order it from the usual online retailers (for Amazon UK, click here) or from your local bricks-and-mortar bookshop.

Anyway, here's the publisher blurb and all that: 

Nancy Reynard is the youngest of seven children. She is the seventh child of a seventh child. In fact, as both of her parents are seventh children, she is a seventh child twice over. She is the daughter of Colonel Septimus Reynard and his wife Blanche, and she lives very happily with her family at the Warren in Minchester until she reaches the age of ten, when she discovers that she has the gift of second sight; unfortunately, it is more of a nuisance and inconvenience for poor Nancy. She starts ‘seeing’ things, in particular things about her sister Blanche's new fiancé, and blurting them out for all and sundry to hear, much to his annoyance. And so begins Nancy’s career as a reluctant psychic detective. And now, no liar, thief or murderer is safe when she is near… or thousands of miles away.

Nancy is one of the earliest fictional psychic detectives, and she is unusual in being female and, when her gift makes its first appearance at least, just a child. A Seventh Child was first published in 1894. John Strange Winter was the pen name of the Victorian writer Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Stannard. This new edition includes an introductory essay by Gina R. Collia: 'John Strange Winter: Author, Wife, Mother & Purveyor of Toilet Preparations’.. (Publisher website: Click here)

Nezu Press, 29 September 2023. 

ISBN-13: 978-1-7393921-4-7.  

Hardback with dust jacket, 246 pages.

The new Nezu Press edition of A Seventh Child alongside the original first edition. And a large photographic portrait of the author John Strange Winter (Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Stannard) by Herbert R. Barraud.