Eleanor M. Ingram

Eleanor M. Ingram built an American fiction career across novels and magazine stories in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The Thing From the Lake is a supernatural novel built around a composer, an isolated house, and an unseen presence, while From the Car Behind turns to the then-new culture of automobile racing. The second book follows drivers, mechanics, and family ties within a competitive sporting world, a setting Ingram used repeatedly in her fiction. Project Gutenberg credits From the Car Behind to Eleanor Marie Ingram, dates her life from 1886 to 1921, and classifies the novel under automobile-racing fiction. A later Nezu Press edition of The Thing from the Lake includes a biographical essay on her life and work. Her range from motor stories to uncanny fiction reflects a period when popular novels rapidly absorbed new technologies alongside older Gothic traditions.