Hester Gaskell Holland Gorst


Hester Gaskell Holland Gorst was a British writer and artist. Her horror stories are often anthologized.

Early life and education

Gorst was born in Wavertree, Liverpool, the daughter of Walter Holland and Alice Franklin Wray Holland. Her father was a steamship owner; her mother was born in India to British parents. She attended the Slade [School of Fine Art] from 1904 to 1906, working with painter Henry Tonks, with further studies in Brussels.

Career

Gorst was an artist and sculptor. In 1931 she exhibited her "delightfully fanciful work" at the Cooling Galleries in London. Paintings by Gorst were featured in the Stock Exchange Art Society Exhibitions in 1952 and 1953. She made a bust of John Brunt in 1961. In 1979, she had a one-woman exhibition of her paintings in London, partly organized by her granddaughter Jessica Gorst-Williams, and appeared on the Russell Harty television program. She was a social acquaintance of Wyndham Lewis.

Publications

Gorst contributed a poem to a memorial tribute to Lord Kitchener in 1916. Her short fiction has been reprinted regularly, usually in collections of horror stories. "Dorner Cordaianthus" is about a paleobotanist who discovers and plants an ancient fertile seed; it was first collected in Christine Campbell Thomson's anthology Grim Death and also appears in Roots of Evil: Beyond the Secret Life of Plants and Hortus Diabolicus. "The Doll's House" appeared in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, when she was a hundred years old. Her 1936 haunted-house story "The Scream" was adapted for television in 1953.
  • "Dorner Cordaianthus"
  • "Second Sight"
  • "The Door"
  • "In the Park"
  • "Shapes"
  • "High Tide"
  • "Littlesmith"
  • "The Doll's House"
  • "The Library"
  • "The Scream" Weekend for Henry There's Always Oneself A Man Must Live
  • "To Churchill"
  • ''Under the Circumstances''

Personal life

Holland married Elliot Marcet Gorst in 1914. He was a lawyer and founder of the Tunbridge Wells Poetry Society. They lived at Catts Place in Paddock Wood. He died in 1973, and she died in 1992, in London, at the age of 105.