Bessie Kyffin-Taylor

Bessie Kyffin-Taylor was an English writer remembered chiefly for a single collection of supernatural fiction. From Out of the Silence appeared around 1920 with the fuller title From Out of the Silence: Seven Strange Stories. Its tales use haunted rooms, country houses, woodland paths, and echoes of violent events to unsettle domestic settings. “Two Little Red Shoes” examines guardianship and threatened children, while “Outside the House” and “The Twins” are among the collection’s other notable tales. The First World War shadows several stories, giving their encounters with absence and return historical pressure. Surviving accounts of Kyffin-Taylor’s life are sparse, though she was connected with Liverpool and married soldier and politician Gerald Kyffin-Taylor. From Out of the Silence remains her legacy, an example of early twentieth-century British weird fiction in which hauntings acquire a sharper concern with memory, vulnerability, and social duty. Its renewed presence in scholarly work has helped restore Kyffin-Taylor to discussions of women’s supernatural writing.