An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Wife of C.M.Eddy and friend of HPL. In A Gentleman from Angell Street(1961; rpt. LR), Mrs. Eddy maintains that her husband’s mother (Mrs. Grace Eddy) had come to know HPL’s mother at a woman suffrage meeting in 1918 and that at this time the two discovered that their sons were both enthusiasts of the weird. HPL purportedly invited the Eddys to join the UAPA, and Mrs. Eddy also claims that she and her husband contributed to C.W.Smith’s amateur magazine, The Tryout . Then there was a hiatus in relations, but HPL got back in touch shortly after the death of his mother in May 1921. This entire account is, however, missing from Mrs. Eddy’s first memoir, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (in Rhode Island on Lovecraft,ed. Donald M.Grant and Thomas P.Hadley [1945]), and it appears to be a late fabrication intended to magnify the Eddys’ role in HPL’s life. The Eddys do not appear on any membership lists of the UAPA; none of their work appeared in the Tryout;and there is no evidence that Mrs. Lovecraft was interested in woman suffrage. It appears that HPL came to know the Eddys only in the fall of 1923. Mrs. Eddy wrote numerous memoirs of HPL, all saying much the same things as her 1945 account; among them are “Memories of H.P.L.” ( Magazine of Horror, Winter 1965–66), “Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” ( Haunted,June 1968), Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Man and the Image(1969), “H.P.Lovecraft among the Demons” ( The Rhode Islander[ Providence Sunday JournalMagazine], March 8, 1970), H.P.Lovecraft Esquire: Gentleman (n.d.), and The Howard Phillips Lovecraft We Knew(n.d.). She had two daughters, Ruth Eddy and Faye (Eddy) Dyer; the former wrote a brief memoir of HPL, “The Man Who Came at Midnight” ( Fantasy Commentator,Summer–Fall 1949).

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Page 85

“Editorial.”

Published in the Conservative(April 1915, July 1915, October 1915); rpt. The Conservative: Complete (1976; rev. ed. 1977).

These items contain general remarks on the nature and purpose of his amateur journal; later articles contain rebuttals of criticisms he has received in other amateur papers.

“Editorial.”

Published in the United Amateur(July 1917 [as “Editorially”], November 1920, September 1921, January 1922, May 1924, July 1925).

HPL wrote these editorials in his capacity as Official Editor of the UAPA and Editor of the United Amateur(HPL was guest editor of the July 1917 issue, taking over for Official Editor Andrew F.Lockhart, who had resigned). They cover events of importance in the amateur community. The articles of 1920–22 attempt to deflect criticism from some members that HPL was concentrating too much authority upon himself and his close associates; but HPL and his party lost the election of July 1922 over this very issue. HPL’s party (now including Sonia H.Greene as president) was voted back into office in July 1923, but the outgoing official board withheld funds so that no United Amateur could be issued until May 1924. HPL’s last two editorials are, accordingly, both bitter and melancholy in their lament for the decline of the UAPA, which collapsed in 1926.

Edkins, Ernest A[rthur] (1867–1946).

Amateur writer and correspondent of HPL (1932–37). Edkins was one of the leading writers of the “halcyon days” (c. 1885–1895) of amateur journalism. In his account of this period, “Looking Backward” (1920), written long before he knew Edkins, HPL speaks of Edkins’s poem “The Suicide” as “a supremely artistic bit of weird genius…a bit of night-black poetical fancy so arresting in its sombre power that we cannot refrain from reproducing it here in full….” Edkins later left amateurdom and repudiated much of his literary work, becoming instead a businessman in Highland Park, Ill. (later Coral Gables, Fla.). HPL, getting in touch with him in 1932, eventually lured him back into amateur activity. Edkins produced several issues of the amateur journal Causeriein 1936; that for February 1936 contained the first appearance of “Continuity” (from Fungi from Yuggoth). In this same issue Edkins also wrote a brief review of The Cats of Ulthar(1935). HPL preserved all Edkins’s letters to him, but in his eloquent memoir “Idiosyncrasies of HPL” ( Olympian,Autumn 1940; in LR) Edkins notes that he lost most or all of HPL’s letters to him.

See Rheinhart Kleiner, Ernest A.Edkins: A Memoir(Newtonville, Mass.: Oakwood Press, 1947). “Eidolon, The.”