BU Today: Can you sum up Scott’s contribution to horror literature? Did she influence other writers?

Aaron Worth: It’s been difficult to establish much by way of direct influence, though this may change in the future as more scholarly attention is hopefully directed at Scott and her fiction. It may be the case that she was one of the first to blend creative elements together into something which would only be later recognized as a distinctive genre. When folk horror became a cinematic phenomenon, I suspect that scholars and editors began to look back for literary precursors and antecedents. Horror anthologists “discovered” Scott’s stories in the 1970s, in the wake of Wicker Man and similar films in Britain.

BU Today: Why isn’t she better known?

Aaron Worth: Sexism is a possibility, though the ghost story has always been associated with women writers at least as much as men, so other factors are likely at work as well. Scott only wrote a single volume of horror stories, with poor sales that were not helped by a book jacket that made it look like “a bucolic children’s book,” in the words of one anthologist. It was reviewed by major outlets including the Times Literary Supplement, but contemporary reviewers tended to focus on Scott’s debts to other writers. Those debts are real, though Scott reworks other writers’ themes to add crucial elements of gender politics, for instance.

It may be that Scott’s real originality in the treatment of folklore and folkways as horror was not apparent to her contemporaries. In a sense, she had to wait for the 20th- and 21st century-explosion of “folk horror” to be discovered as the pioneer that, in my view, she is. If Scott is indeed the author of the two pseudonymous tales I include, then her status as an innovative practitioner of folk horror should perhaps be even higher.

BU Today: How did you happen to discover her work? Given your other research interests, what intrigues you about horror and this particular horror writer?

Aaron Worth: I must have encountered at least one of the stories from Randalls Round in an anthology at some point. But I think I first became aware of her through brief and cryptic entries in certain reference works, and omissions in others, and [became] interested in her for that same reason. I sought out Randalls Round because Scott and her stories sounded intriguing. As a scholar and editor of classic horror writers, I am always on the lookout for forgotten treasures.

BU Today: What do we know about Scott’s personal life? Was it happy personally and professionally? Did it influence her writing?

Aaron Worth: It is probably no accident that both Helen Leys and her sister Mary became writers, as their father, a failed barrister, had been a successful author of sensational novels. Religion also loomed large in the household—their father’s conversion from Presbyterianism to Catholicism had led to a bitter custody battle over the children of his first marriage—and this topic definitely can be found in Scott’s fiction. She was educated at Oxford and seems to have found fulfillment in teaching, another subject explored in these stories. Much still remains to be established about the details of her life.