Phyllis paul

Phyllis Paul (1903 - 1973) was an English novelist.
Phyllis Paul was an English novelist.
A subtle novelist, her work invokes an atmosphere of the supernatural and often allows for a supernatural interpretation.

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Radhika's Reading Retreat

I have read some wonderful books published by McNally Editions so far such as Han Suyin’s Winter Love, Maxine Clair’s Rattlebone, Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, and Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns, and I am now a fan. Based on these successes, I purchased a few more titles from McNally’s list of which Phyllis Paul’s Twice Lost was one, and what an amazing novel it turned out to be.

Set in an idyllic village called Hilbery, Phyllis Paul’s Twice Lost is a wonderfully odd and beautifully written novel of deception and manipulation, twisted realities, and ulterior motives steeped in gothic atmosphere and liberally peppered with hints of mystery and suspense.

On a summer’s day after a carefree tennis party, eighteen-year-old Christine Gray and her friend Penelope are helping a young girl Vivian Lambert find a piece of jewellery that she seems to have lost. The girls hunt in the overgrown, menacing, and shadowy garden in vain and halt the search altogether as dusk descends upon them.

Vivian unsettles Christine greatly; she is a negl

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Twice Lost

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In a rustic, idyllic English village, on a summer’s day, in the midst of a carefree tennis party, a fragile, needy child, left too much on her own, vanishes from her family’s front garden. Years pass and the mystery persists: an enduring torment for the teenage Christine Gray, the last person to see Vivian alive. Perhaps if she’d shown the girl a little kindness, and seen her safely home, Vivian might still be with them? Yet when someone claiming to be a grown-up Vivian returns to the land of the living, the enigma only deepens, threatening to consume the wicked and innocent alike.

Equal parts The Turn of the Screw, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and gothic thriller, Twice Lost was admired by such authors as Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, and John Cowper Powys—yet the strange, haunting novels of Phyllis Paul are themselves a mystery with no simple solution. Virtually lost to time even before her death, her novels have been out of print for more than fifty years, and fetch fantastic prices in the rare book trade.

“Beautifully execute

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Phyllis Paul: Twice Lost, Pulled Down, Invisible Darkness, A Little Treachery, more

Two spinster sisters from London sink almost all their money, trusting an architect's verdict, into buying a cottage on a busy street in a rural village. The house turns out to be in bad condition from damp, etc. and the garden is waterlogged and overgrown with weeds. One of the sisters seems to be retreating into mental illness. The other decides to build a bonfire to burn some of the yard waste, to do something. Dusk falls.

"Suddenly, with the dizzying and limitless astonishment of a nightmare, she perceived that there was a building stand- / ing towards the summit of the hill [beyond their garden bounds], within the dark woods. She saw it very imperfectly, but what she saw made the blood sing in her head and her knees feel weak. How could there be, in that rustic spot, towering, buttressed walls, topped by arches, colonnade supporting colonnade? And, still above these, vast rotundas, from each of which was lifted up on high a long staff surmounted by a gleaming sign while, against the