ERNEST G. HENHAM (JOHN TREVENA)
Author biography:
Ernest George Henham (“John Trevena”) was born in England in 1870, and as a young man travelled to America and Canada and lived for some time in the Canadian Northwest. His experiences in Canada, including his memories of the Riel Rebellion in the 1880s, provided the inspiration for some of his early works, which were published under his own name. As Ernest G. Henham, he published Menotah: A Tale of the Riel Rebellion (1897), which ran into at least three editions, God, Man & The Devil: A Novel (1897); the weird Gothic horror novel Tenebrae (1898); Bonanza: A Story of the Outside (1901); Scud: The Story of a Feud (1902); The Plowshare and the Sword: A Tale of Old Quebec (1903); ‘Krum’: A Study of Consciousness (1904); and The Feast of Bacchus: A Study in Dramatic Atmosphere (1907).
Suffering from ill health, he moved to Dartmoor around this time. In the words of a contemporary, “It is one of the strangest facts in literary history that a man, who had defined his place as a writer of fiction with nine novels or so, published under his own name, should have seen fit, after the Boer War, to begin his career afresh and write a long series of commercially unsuccessful novels under a pseudonym.” However, this was what Henham did, publishing A Pixy in Petticoats anonymously in 1906 before adopting the pseudonym John Trevena in 1907 for publication of Furze the Cruel. Furze was the first in a trilogy of novels focusing upon Dartmoor life, followed by Heather (1908) and Granite (1909). He continued to write prolifically, achieving widespread critical acclaim but little commercial success; his notable works include Bracken (1910), the story collection Written in the Rain (1910), Wintering Hay (1912), which the Los Angeles Times ranked with the works of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Sleeping Waters (1913), and Moyle Church-Town (1915). Trevena’s life has become so shrouded in obscurity that as of the time of this printing even his date of death is not known, but he is believed to have died around 1946. Until Valancourt Books’ edition of Furze the Cruel in 2010, all his works were out of print, despite the near-universal critical consensus during his lifetime that his works would live on among the classics of English fiction.
Ernest George Henham (“John Trevena”) was born in England in 1870, and as a young man travelled to America and Canada and lived for some time in the Canadian Northwest. His experiences in Canada, including his memories of the Riel Rebellion in the 1880s, provided the inspiration for some of his early works, which were published under his own name. As Ernest G. Henham, he published Menotah: A Tale of the Riel Rebellion (1897), which ran into at least three editions, God, Man & The Devil: A Novel (1897); the weird Gothic horror novel Tenebrae (1898); Bonanza: A Story of the Outside (1901); Scud: The Story of a Feud (1902); The Plowshare and the Sword: A Tale of Old Quebec (1903); ‘Krum’: A Study of Consciousness (1904); and The Feast of Bacchus: A Study in Dramatic Atmosphere (1907).
Suffering from ill health, he moved to Dartmoor around this time. In the words of a contemporary, “It is one of the strangest facts in literary history that a man, who had defined his place as a writer of fiction with nine novels or so, published under his own name, should have seen fit, after the Boer War, to begin his career afresh and write a long series of commercially unsuccessful novels under a pseudonym.” However, this was what Henham did, publishing A Pixy in Petticoats anonymously in 1906 before adopting the pseudonym John Trevena in 1907 for publication of Furze the Cruel. Furze was the first in a trilogy of novels focusing upon Dartmoor life, followed by Heather (1908) and Granite (1909). He continued to write prolifically, achieving widespread critical acclaim but little commercial success; his notable works include Bracken (1910), the story collection Written in the Rain (1910), Wintering Hay (1912), which the Los Angeles Times ranked with the works of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Sleeping Waters (1913), and Moyle Church-Town (1915). Trevena’s life has become so shrouded in obscurity that as of the time of this printing even his date of death is not known, but he is believed to have died around 1946. Until Valancourt Books’ edition of Furze the Cruel in 2010, all his works were out of print, despite the near-universal critical consensus during his lifetime that his works would live on among the classics of English fiction.
TITLES BY THIS AUTHOR
|
|
|
|