The Berkshire Eagle newspaper’s ‘Mysteries from the Morgue’ column has a new piece on Anna Helen Crofts. Crofts was an amateur journalist and a one-time collaborator with Lovecraft on “Poetry and the Gods” (1920). Unlike many, the newspaper is accessible from outside the USA. It adds some details about her later life, and it seems she married well in 1945 and had a very fine retirement.

Joshi’s I Am Providence has a section on the story and he remarks…

she appears under her own name in the UAPA [amateur journalism] membership lists, residing at 343 West Main Street in North Adams, Massachusetts, in the far northwestern corner of the state. I have no idea how Lovecraft came in touch with her or why he chose to collaborate on this tale; he never mentions it or his coauthor in any correspondence I have ever seen. … This [story] is surely one of the most peculiar items in Lovecraft’s fictional corpus, not only for its utterly unknown genesis but for its anomalous theme.

For more details see my A few additions for Anna Helen Crofts (1889-1975) post, and the linked online copy of The Fossil #341, July 2009 (Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., “The strange story of “Poetry and the Gods” by Anna Helen Crofts and Henry Paget-Lowe”).

The newspaper has not felt able to print the photo which sits alongside her 1919 school yearbook entry, possibly due to its small size. But here it that photo via Archive.org, and I’ve suitably enhanced and enlarged and colourised it as much as possible from such a scan of a tiny old picture…

I have a larger 1300px version if anyone wants it, but it shows the blobbling more than this reduction.