In 1992 I subscribed to a fanzine called Futures Past which attempted to be a serial history of science fiction. Each issue would cover one year in the chronology of the world of SF, starting with 1926. The first issue had a column, "Books of 1926" and it ran 31 one-paragraph descriptions of the SF/fantasy books published that year. Most of those books were destined to be forgotten. One of those forgotten books struck my attention, Phoenix by a Lady Dorothy Mills [Dorothy Rachael Melissa Mills (Walpole) 1889-1959]. The one paragraph summary went as follows: 
Dr. Henry Antonius has developed a way to reverse the aging process. He enlists the aid of an elderly widow as his subject, and though long and painful, the experiment is a success. The (now young) woman returns home to England where she finds romance with a handsome young aristocrat. Meanwhile, Antonius has fallen in love with her himself and he becomes bitter and cruel at not being her chosen suitor. Animosities grow and by the end of the book the Doctor and his unrequited love have done each other in.
I have since found one other, fuller description of Phoenix from Science-Fiction: The Early Years by Everett F. Bleiler, a mammoth reference work that contains "A full description of more than 3,000 science-fiction stories from earliest times to the appearance of the genre magazines in 1930." Bleiler calls Phoenix a "shopgirl romance." Here is his synopsis of the novel:
On shipboard from Australia to England Mrs. Joanna Fersen, a wealthy widow, confides her life history to Dr. Henry Antonius. A beautiful woman with some stage experience when young, she married unfortunately, became widowed, and served as a domestic drudge for decades, until a few months ago a small investment in a gold mine exploded her into great wealth. But it is too late. She is sixty-five years old. Antonius in turn confides his secret to her: He has perfected a process for rejuvenating older people, but until now he has worked with animals. He needs a human subject. His treatment would bring her back to about age thirty-five physically. The process is long, painful, and risky, but Mrs. Fersen accepts. Two years later, she is the beautiful young Mrs. Fersen, courted in London society. She has found romance, and is engaged to marry Lord Morries. But all is not well. Antonius has fallen in love with her, and (since he is part Levantine and, the author feels, without true English honor) grows nasty. Indeed, in the later portions of the novel he may have gone mad with sexual frustration. News of Antonius's process spreads, and other rejuvenees, including a spiteful woman, make Mrs. Fersen's position with Morries precarious. When Morries learns that she is old enough to be his mother, romance dies. Both parties decide that they cannot risk marriage. Joanna and the other rejuvenees burn down Antonius's laboratory, and in retaliation he shoots her. Then himself. Literate in expression, but the values!
Not much of a story line, but it intrigued me. I started looking for the book, but had no luck. Then in 1996 I read Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, a novel about an elderly woman who is transformed by a rejuvenation treatment, and runs off to Europe to join the bohemian art and radical politics crowd. Seventy years later the idea has resurfaced. I'm quite sure that Sterling didn't steal the idea, and it occurred to me that science fiction might be based on reoccurring ideas that surface over and over again. Given time, ideas will be forgotten, and someone will come along and think up the idea and apply it to a new story or novel. Imagine seventy years from now that Isaac Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy might be out of print and forgotten, and a young writer gets the idea of applying The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to a galactic history and writes a book. She won't tell the same story, but the idea that sparks it will be from a similar inspiration.
How many forgotten classics are out there? Was H. G. Wells the first author to write about an alien invasion or the building of a time machine?
Thinking about this made me want to find Phoenix all the more. By then the Internet was available, and so was ABEBooks.com. For years I've been keeping my eye out for this book trying to find it, but with no luck. [I acquired a copy in 2002.] I'm thinking it will make an interesting essay to compare how this idea is developed in the two novels. And I wonder, how many times has it been used before? Is H. Rider Haggard's She another variation on the theme? And what about Lost Horizon by James Hilton? Both are different stories, but they have some common elements. In each case, did the writer think about what if an old woman could be made young again, how would she behave?
Once I returned to my search to find a copy of Phoenix I got interested in finding out more about the mysterious Lady Dorothy Mills. The Internet just gave me a couple of tantalizing glimpses. I've been able to buy three of her other books, including an autobiography. [10 books by 2004] Generally, they are priced beyond what I can spend. From what I can tell, Lady Mills was born to an aristocratic family, but gave up money and position for freedom and love of a common man. Or at least that's the story she tells in A Different Drummer, Chapters in Autobiography. To make her own money, a new concept for Lady Mills, she wrote about her trips to Africa and sold them to magazines. I assume that single women visiting Africa in the 1920's was exciting stuff and people were willing to pay to read about Lady Mill's adventures.
I also own The Golden Land, 1929 which chronicles Lady Mills travels in West Africa. [See photo above.] Her claim to fame was she was a white woman traveling alone on the dark continent, but her book clearly discusses other westerners, including women living in Africa. [See my bibliography below for books on adventurous women, which proves Lady Mills was hardly unique.] She claims her travels took her further inland than any other woman at the time. I don't know if that is true. That's part of the mystery, I don't know what is true if I can't find any other sources that discuss her life. Mills wrote several travel books, a handful of novels, and then disappeared. Why?
Now I had two ideas to deal with. The first deals with ideas for stories. My theory is that story ideas have a lifetime, and except for a very few books, most stories and their ideas are forgotten after a few years by the reading public. The second idea, is authors go through a similar cycle and become forgotten, and maybe even authors, like ideas, get recycled. Are there women writing today that have thrown off family wealth and glamour and gone off to make a living writing about doing things that women have never done before?
Thus, one short paragraph in an obscure magazine, has planted the seeds for many ideas to think and develop. Now I have a whole project to develop. I want to collect the works of Lady Dorothy Mills and analyze them. Is fiction just fiction, or does it represent clues to history? Clues to literary history for sure, but also to a personal history and philosophy. I also want to collect and compare the ideas in her novels with earlier and later novels. Ideas have a life of their own. I want to explore the nature of forgotten writers, and investigate the nature of minor writers. Most people who study literature, study major writers. I'm inclined to study minor writers. If you know anything about Lady Dorothy Mills please contact me at jharris@memphis.edu.