Gerald William Bullett was a British man of letters. He was known as a novelist, essayist, short story writer, critic and poet. He wrote both supernatural fiction

Supernatural fiction

Supernatural fiction is a literary genre exploiting or requiring as plot devices or themes some contradictions of the commonplace natural world and materialist assumptions about it....

 and some children's literature

Children's literature

Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...

.

Bullett was born in London and educated at Jesus College, Cambridge

Jesus College, Cambridge

Jesus College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The College was founded in 1496 on the site of a Benedictine nunnery by John Alcock, then Bishop of Ely...

. During World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 he worked for the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 in London, and after the war was a radio broadcaster. Bullett also contributed to the
Times Literary Supplement. Politically, Bullett described himself as a "liberal socialist" and claimed
to detest "prudery, Prohibition

Prohibition

Prohibition of alcohol, often referred to simply as prohibition, is the practice of prohibiting the manufacture, transportation, import, export, sale, and consumption of alcohol and alcoholic beverages. The term can also apply to the periods in the histories of the countries during which the...

, "blood sports, central heating, and literary
tea parties".

One of his novels was Mr. Godly Beside Himself (1924), a humorous fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...

 story about a modern man who exchanges places with his doppelganger in fairyland

Fairyland

Fairyland commonly refers to the land of fairies, in folklore.Fairyland may also refer to:* Álfheimr, the abode of the elves in Norse mythology* Elfhame or Elfland, the abode of the elves in English and Lowland Scottish folklore...

. Brian Stableford

Brian Stableford

Brian Michael Stableford is a British science fiction writer who has published more than 70 novels. His earlier books were published as by Brian M. Stableford, but more recent ones have dropped the middle initial and appeared under the name Brian Stableford...

 likens
Bullet's novel to other works of post-WWI British fantasy, such as Stella Benson

Stella Benson

Stella Benson was an English feminist, travel writer, and novelist.-Early life:Benson was born to Ralph Beaumont Benson , a member of the landed gentry, and Caroline Essex Cholmondeley at Lutwyche Hall in Shropshire in 1892. Stella's aunt, Mary Cholmondeley, was a novelist. Stella was often ill...

's Living Alone (1919), and Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlees was a British translator, poet and novelist. She is best known for the 1926 Lud-in-the-Mist, a fantasy novel and influential classic, and for Paris: A Poem, a modernist poem which critic Julia Briggs deemed "modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity,...

' Lud-in-the-Mist

Lud-in-the-Mist

Lud-in-the-Mist is the third of three novels by Hope Mirrlees, and the only one still in print . It continues the author's exploration of the themes of Life and Art, by a method already described in the preface of her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists : "to turn from time to time...

(1926).

Works

• The Progress Of Kay, A Series of Glimpses (1916)
• The Street of the Eye and Nine Other Tales (1923)
• Mr Godly Beside Himself (1924)
• Walt Whitman: A Study and a Selection (1924)
• The Baker's Cart And Other Tales (1925)
• Modern English Fiction (1926)
• Seed of Israel: Tales from the English Bible (1927).
• The Spanish Caravel (1927), later The Happy Mariners (1956)
• "Dreaming" (1928), essay
• The World in Bud And Other Tales (1928)
• Nicky Son of Egg (1929)
• The History of Egg Pandervil (1929)
• (ed.) Short Stories of To-day and Yesterday (1929)
• Germany (1930)
• Remember Mrs Munch (1931)
• Marden Fee (1931)
• Helen's Lovers And Other Tales (1932)
• (ed.) The Testament of Light (1932), anthology
• I'll Tell You Everything (1932), with J. B. Priestley
  J. B. Priestley
  John Boynton Priestley, OM , known as J. B. Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published 26 novels, notably The Good Companions , as well as numerous dramas such as An Inspector Calls...
  
  
• The Quick And The Dead (1933)
• (ed.) The Pattern of Courtesy: An Anthology, Continuing the Testament of Light (1934)
• Eden River (1934)
• The Bubble (1934)
• The Jury (1935)
• The Snare of the Fowler: A Tragedy of Time & Chance (1936), as Sebastion Fox
• Poems in Pencil (1937)
• The Innocence of G. K. Chesterton (1937)
• (ed.) A Book of Good Faith – Montaigne: A Miscellany of Passages (1938)
• The Bending Sickle (1938), novel
• Twenty Four Tales (1938)
• (ed.) The Phœnix and Turtle (1938)
• (ed.) The Jackdaw's Nest, A Fivefold Anthology (1939)
• When the Cat's Away (1940)
• A Man of Forty (1940)
• (ed.) The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems (1942)
• Winter Solstice (1943)
• The Elderbrook Brothers (1945)
• (ed.) Readings in English Literature: From Chaucer to Matthew Arnold (1945)
• Judgment in Suspense (1946) novel
• (tr.) The Golden Year of Fan Cheng-Ta: A Chinese Rural Sequence Rendered into English Verse (1946)
• George Eliot (1947)
• Men at High Table and The House of Strangers (1948)
• (ed.) Silver Poets of the 16th Century (1949)
• Poems (1949)
• Cricket in Heaven (1949)
• The English Mystics (1950)
• Sydney Smith, a Biography and a Selection (1951)
• The Trouble at Number Seven (1952)
• News From The Village (1952), poems
• The Alderman’s Son (1954), novel
• Windows On A Vanished Time (1955)
• The Daughters of Mrs Peacock 1957
• The Peacock Brides (1958)
• Ten-Minute Tales and some Others (1959)
• Collected Poems (1959), selection by E. M. W. Tillyard
  E. M. W. Tillyard
  Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard was a British classical scholar and literary scholar. He was a Fellow in English at Jesus College and later Master of Jesus College , Cambridge. He is known mainly for his book The Elizabethan World Picture, as background to Elizabethan Literature,...