Sweet Ermengarde

"Sweet Ermergarde"
Author	H.P. Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Parody short story
Published in	Arkham House
Publication date	1943

"Sweet Ermengarde" is a short comic story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft under the pseuodym "Percy Simple". It 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."^[1] It was first published in the Arkham House 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 fiance Algernon Reginald Jones. Daniel Harms calls it "a take-off on the Horatio Alger 'rags-to-riches' genre".^[2] An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia 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'."^[3]

Reception

An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia describes the story (with A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Ibid (short story) as one of a trilogy of Lovecraft's "comic gems".^[3] Harms describes it as "actually quite funny at places."^[4]

Notes

↑ S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, "Sweet Ermengrade", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, pp. 257-258.
↑ Daniel Harms, "Sweet Ermengarde", The Shadow over Usenet.
1 2 Joshi and Schultz, p. 258.
↑ Harms, "Sweet Ermengarde".

External links

Works related to Sweet Ermengarde at Wikisource
Sweet Ermengarde public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Works by H. P. Lovecraft

Cthulhu Mythos Dream Cycle

Novellas	The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Case of Charles Dexter Ward The Whisperer in Darkness At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow over Innsmouth The Shadow Out of Time

Short stories	"The Tomb" "Dagon" "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" "Polaris" "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" "Memory" "Old Bugs" "The Transition of Juan Romero" "The White Ship" "The Street" "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" "The Statement of Randolph Carter" "The Terrible Old Man" "The Tree" "The Cats of Ulthar" "The Temple" "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" "Celephaïs" "From Beyond" "Nyarlathotep" "The Picture in the House" "Ex Oblivione" "Sweet Ermengarde" "The Nameless City" "The Quest of Iranon" "The Moon-Bog" "The Outsider" "The Other Gods" "The Music of Erich Zann" "Herbert West–Reanimator" "Hypnos" "What the Moon Brings" "Azathoth" "The Hound" "The Lurking Fear" "The Rats in the Walls" "The Unnamable" "The Festival" "The Shunned House" "The Horror at Red Hook" "He" "In the Vault" "Cool Air" "The Call of Cthulhu" "Pickman's Model" "The Silver Key" "The Strange High House in the Mist" "The Colour Out of Space" "The Descendant" "History of the Necronomicon" "The Very Old Folk" "Ibid" "The Dunwich Horror" "The Dreams in the Witch House" "The Thing on the Doorstep" "The Evil Clergyman" "The Book" "The Haunter of the Dark"

Collaborations	"The Green Meadow" "The Crawling Chaos" "The Horror at Martin's Beach" "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" "The Curse of Yig" "The Mound" "Medusa's Coil" "The Horror in the Museum" "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" "Out of the Aeons" "The Tree on the Hill" "Till A’the Seas" "In the Walls of Eryx" "The Thing in the Moonlight"

Juvenilia	"The Mystery of the Grave-Yard" "The Beast in the Cave" "The Alchemist"

Poetry	Fungi from Yuggoth

Essays	"Supernatural Horror in Literature" To Quebec and the Stars The Cancer of Superstition Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity

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