The Villa: An innocent viewing of a villa opens a disturbing door to its past

Growing up in genteel circumstances, her early childhood was spent at Charlton Down House near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and her teenage years near Heythrop in the Cotswolds.

She was educated at home by governesses, excelling at German, Latin, Greek, shorthand, landscape painting, and fabric and wallpaper design.

In 1897 she went to Mauritius as companion to her cousin Caroline and in 1898 married Maurice Wilhemn Wiehe, the owner of a sugar plantation. She gave birth to two stillborn children. After a few years of marriage, she found life difficult and returned to England. Shortly afterwards she went by herself to Australia, arriving in June 1902 and gave birth to a son a few months later.

She lived in Melbourne for about eight years. To earn a living she took on a wide and varied range of jobs; she edited a woman's fashion paper, wrote short stories and articles, made blouses, designed embroideries, tilled gardens, acted as a housekeeper, and did other artistic work. Her health was not strong, but she undertook any kind of work which would provide a living for herself and her infant son. This gained her an experience of life which was readily put to use in her literary works.

Her first book, ‘The Garden of Contentment’, was published in 1902 under her pen-name Elinor Mordaunt. It was the first of many works that covered fiction, short stories, travel and autobiography.

She changed her name by deed poll to Evelyn May Mordaunt on 1st July 1915 and gained a further reputation as a writer of short stories for magazines which display both her humour and sense of tragedy. Travel was always high on her priority and the experiences used not only for pleasure but in her writings and, as travel books, ideas in themselves.

On 27th January 1933 at Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, she married a retired barrister from Gloucestershire. In her own words, the marriage ‘ended in tragedy.’

Elinor Mordaunt died on 25th June 1942 at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. She was 70.

In this story Mordaunt takes a house and a wish and reveals a very troubling family history.