Book News ~ The Door Ajar by Virginia Milward

I am very pleased to announce that the next Nezu Press release (well, one of two) will be The Door Ajar by Virginia Milward, originally published in 1912 and never republished. Its author, Pearl (Virginia was a pseudonym, and she preferred Pearl to her actual Christian name, Margaret), had an unhappy life, and her stories were very much inspired by her own experiences. The Door Ajar was Pearl's only published collection of tales, and she appears to have given up writing entirely in 1920, despite the fact that she didn't die until 1968.

Here's the blurb, etc.:

The Door Ajar, a collection of seven short stories of the weird and uncanny by Virginia Milward, was first published by William Rider & Son, Limited, in the spring of 1912. Two of the tales are premonitory, and three of them involve haunted objects—a book from the time of plague, a silver box that witnessed the French Revolution, and a painting from fifteenth-century Florence—that reveal the tragic ends of those who once possessed them. The atmosphere in all of the stories is oppressive; the women in them are haunted, desperate, tortured, abandoned or exhausted, and the cause for their sad state is usually a man, for ‘where men go pain follows—pain and misery of mind.’ These are tales in which ‘woman suffers and the man sins, and the man shares all the sin, but not the suffering.’

This Nezu Press edition, the first republication of the collection since 1912, includes a 17-page biographical essay by Gina R. Collia that reveals the real identity of the author and paints a vivid picture of her troubled life: “ ‘I Have No Use for Men’: The Life of Pearl Rudkin.”

Published: 30 June 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-917113-10-6.
Case laminate hardback, 22.86mm x 15.24cm (6" x 9"), 136 pages.

I wrote a post about the stories in this collection a little time back, and you can read it by clicking here.

The book is available to pre-order from the Nezu Press store (please click here); global shipping is available. Alternatively, it will be available from the usual online retailers soon, and you can order it from bricks-and-mortar stores.