Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) is remembered for her Jack the Ripper novel, The Lodger (1913), which became a Hitchcock movie. She was one of the best known writers of genre fiction in her own day, and was extremely well-connected. She was best friends with the wife of the British PM Asquith, and on the day that war was declared, she was in a unique position. In this excerpt from her memoir, she takes us back to the day that the lamps went out all over Europe, in 1914.

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