F. Georgia Stroup (1882-1952)-The First Woman Author

Fannie Georgia Stroup was the first woman writer in Weird Tales, or I should say the first writer known to have been a woman. After all, two in that first issue used only their initials, while a third remained anonymous. She was born in Missouri in 1882 and lived in her youth in Kansas, where she worked as a schoolteacher. In 1909, at age twenty-seven, she married and moved to California with her new husband. Neither her marriage nor her sojourn in California lasted especially long. By 1930, she was back in the Midwest and living in Chicago. (I suspect she was in Chicago as early as 1922 or 1923, thus in the right spot to submit her story to Weird Tales.) In 1950, she was at the Wyndon Hotel in that city. F. Georgia Stroup died in 1952 at age seventy, presumably at East Moline State Hospital, in East Moline, Illinois, for that is where she lies buried. "The House of Death" was her only story for Weird Tales. In fact, it is her only known work of fiction. I have written about her before. Click here to read what I wrote.

F. Georgia Stroup's Story:

"The House of Death" is a sad story about a terrible event. It isn't a fantasy or a weird tale at all, though it isn't exactly mainstream, either. The story is set in a Kansas farmhouse. Its characters are three women who talk among themselves as they work in a house where a tragic death has occurred. One theme in the story is how hard life is for a farm wife. Another is of a kind of family curse, a common theme in weird fiction. The narrative is interrupted when the women find a letter that had been secreted away in a horsehair trunk in an upstairs room. The letter explains things in a way that the women could only have speculated about before they had read it. It decides them on what to do next.

"The House of Death" by F. Georgia Stroup is a sad and tragic story. I would rather show a happy picture and one of my favorites. Georgia wrote her story about farm life in Kansas. The photograph above is from a book about that same kind of life and that same place. The book is Farm Town: A Memoir of the 1930s, with photographs by J.W. McGanigal and text by Grant Heilman (Brattleboro, VT: The Stephen Greene Press, 1974). Georgia lived and worked in Miami and Linn counties, south of Kansas City. McGanigal lived and worked in Horton, in Brown County (the same county in which George Warburton Lewis was born), west of Atchison. This is a beautifully and perfectly made picture, taken at just the right instant. This man and this woman will forever be young and beautiful and in love. He will forever be her protector and provider, she forever his helpmate.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley