Back O' the Moon and Other Stories

by Oliver Onions

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1906 Excerpt: ... THE FAIRWAY. Except that he called the gipsies the "Johnnie Faws," there was little of the rustic in his speech; and as he told the tale we seemed to see them, these Johnnie Faws, coming down the hill on that wild January forenoon. They did not come by the Portsannet road--it would have passed mortal eyes to find a road in the whirl and scurry and drift of white he described--but spread out like pheasant-beaters, crying one to another in the Romany, sometimes flung forward by the tempest, sometimes huddled down and covered over almost entirely by the snow. Perhaps the fact that he had been a schoolmaster accounted for an occasional positiveness in his manner, --it seems to remain with schoolmasters to the end of their days, --and he was an old man, who must be let talk after his own fashion. He told us how the wind swept out the tracks of the Johnny Faws behind them, and how the South Ness women looked compassionately on their wilder sisters, who did not cover their breasts once in ten years, but who had sought refuge from the storm, as the hares and foxes had done before them; and then he wandered off again, schoolmaster-wise, to tell us how the footprints of a fox over the snow made but a single line, and how a hare would lie at form, and what sort of tracks a robin made.... By and by he took up his tale again. "So we knew it was bad when the Johnnie Faws came down. Queer people--dark, whipcordlooking fellows, and one singularly handsome woman, very swarthy and black-eyed. I remember our women looked at her as if--as if--but our women lived in houses, you see.... Well, first of all we asked them about the Lizzie Martin; but they'd never heard of her. Was she a South Ness boat? they asked. Next we asked them if there was much snow on the Heights; and they an...

182 pages, Paperback

First published May 13, 2009

About the author

George Oliver Onions (1873–1961), who published under the name Oliver Onions, was an English writer of short stories and novels.

Oliver Onions was born in Bradford in 1873. Although he legally changed his name to George Oliver in 1918, he always published under the name Oliver Onions. Onions originally worked as a commercial artist before turning to writing, and the dust jackets of his earliest works included illustrations painted by Onions himself.

Onions was a prolific writer of short stories and novels and is best remembered today for his ghost stories, the most famous of which is probably ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, originally published in Widdershins (1911). Despite being known today chiefly for his supernatural short fiction, Onions also published more than a dozen novels in a variety of genres, including In Accordance with the Evidence (1912), The Tower of Oblivion (1921), The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939), The Story of Ragged Robyn (1945), and Poor Man's Tapestry (1946), which won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize as the best work of fiction published that year.

Onions was apparently a very private individual, and though admired and well-respected in his time, he appears not to have moved in literary circles, and few personal memoirs of him survive. He spent most of his later life in Wales, where he lived with his wife, Berta Ruck (1878-1978), herself a prolific and popular novelist; they had two sons, Arthur (b. 1912) and William (b. 1913). Oliver Onions died in 1961.

Reviews

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a novel and a few short stories first published in 1906, and now seems long out of print.

It is certainly of interest, as it concerns the goings-on of a rural Yorkshire village in the winter of 1778. It’s not plot-driven, rather a tale of the tensions between its colourful inhabitants which eventually boil over.

It’s difficult when reading a writer who is best known for his supernatural themes as over the next page you keep expecting something along those lines to occur, and of course it doesn’t.
But Onions does observe the community well, and there is plenty going on to maintain interest.
Even without the supernatural Onions does write with a dark tone. The humour is sparse, and when it’s there it’s not laugh-out-loud, much more understated.

As a representation of a rural community in Yorkshire during the winter in 1778, it is however, a fascinating piece.