"Sweet Ermengarde" is a short comic story by
American horror fiction
Horror is a genre of fiction which is intended to frighten, scare, or disgust. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which is in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian ...
writer
H. P. Lovecraft under the pseudonym "Percy Simple". As a comedy it is a curiosity of his early writing, and was probably written between 1919 and 1921; Lovecraft scholars state it is "the only work of fiction by HPL that cannot be dated with precision."
It was first published in the
Arkham House
Arkham House is an American publishing house specializing in weird fiction. It was founded in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to publish hardcover collections of H. P. Lovecraft's best works, which had ...
collection ''Beyond the Wall of Sleep'' (1943).
Synopsis
The story is a parody of romantic melodrama, centering on Ethyl Ermengarde Stubbs and her relationships with villainous mortgage-holder 'Squire Hardman, would-be rescuer Jack Manly and fiancé Algernon Reginald Jones. ''
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia
''An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia'' is a reference work written by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. It covers the life and work of American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. First published in 2001 by Greenwood Publishing Group, it was reis ...
'' suggests that a more precise target for Lovecraft's satire was writer Fred Jackson, whose novels often "have exactly the sort of implausibility of plot and sentimentality of action that is parodied in 'Sweet Ermengarde'."
Reception
''An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia'' describes the story (with '
A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson' and '
Ibid') as one of a trilogy of Lovecraft's "comic gems".
Notes
External links
*
*
*
{{Works of H. P. Lovecraft
Short stories by H. P. Lovecraft
1943 short stories