Life and career
Henrietta Dorothy Huskisson was born in Gillingham, the daughter of a Royal Marines officer. In 1869 she married Isaac Edward Everett, a solicitor. She came to publication relatively late. When William Blackwood and Sons issued Iras: A Mystery in 1896, she was in her forties and writing under the name Theo Douglas. That byline remained familiar to readers of her novels for much of her career.
Everett wrote across several kinds of popular fiction. She used historical settings and family mysteries as well as supernatural incidents, and continued publishing after her husband’s death in 1904. By 1920, when her best-remembered collection appeared, the title page gave her married name, Mrs H. D. Everett. She died at Weston-on-Trent in Derbyshire in 1923.
Work and ideas
Iras made an Egyptian burial and the figure of a woman preserved from antiquity the centre of a modern supernatural romance. The novel appeared when British museums and exhibitions had made Egyptian funerary objects familiar to readers far from Egypt. Everett used the distance between a body seen as an archaeological find and a person with a claim upon the living to sustain the mystery.
The Death-Mask and Other Ghosts gathered shorter pieces whose disturbances enter more familiar surroundings. A deathbed promise or a troubling object can outlast the person who gave it meaning. The collection has been reprinted by specialist publishers of ghost stories. Those editions kept Everett’s name in circulation even as much of the longer fiction signed Theo Douglas became difficult to find.
