In the small village of Itchno, which is on the outskirts of the town of Konotop, in the small Province of Chernigov, on the cold and wintry night of March 16, 1883, with the temperature several degrees below zero, an infant girl was born.
—Sonia H. Davis, Two Hearts That Beat As One (2024) 1

In February 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine, I noted the news as the invaders moved through Konotop, the birthplace of Sonia H. Davis, who had once been Sonia H. Lovecraft. In 2019, when I prepared my notes for a panel at NecronomiCon on Lovecraft’s ex-wife, I had wondered if there were any records of her early life still there in the city. As the Russians overran the city, any hope I had of some original documents about Sonia or her family surviving to fill in the gaps in her early life faded.

It was mid-October 2022 when I got in touch with Monica Wasserman (The Papers of Sonia H. Davis), and to my surprise found there were better sources closer at hand than Konotop. We shared a common interest in the former Sonia H. Greene, who had become Mrs. Lovecraft. However, Monica’s dedication to the subject far outstripped mine. Her considerable research on Sonia’s life included access to the papers of Sonia and her third husband at Brown University, tracking down some of Sonia’s books and the extremely scarce second issue of The Rainbow, and scouring newspaper archives and genealogical databases. She even managed to access photographs of Sonia that had never been published, and contacted Sonia’s living relatives for family lore.

My own research was more modest, though complementary: while Monica had focused on her subject, I’d been focused on everything else around Sonia. I had been meticulously reading H. P. Lovecraft’s letters for references to Sonia, and had obtained access to other correspondence from or related to Sonia in various archives. Monica had unearthed the goods: I could offer a bit of context and insight from the Lovecraftian side of things. When Monica followed through on her project of actually publishing Sonia’s autobiography, unearthed from the archive and supplemented by additional autobiographical materials like The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis, she was very gracious in allowing me to be a beta reader and to comment on it before publication. Because a few of my suggestions found their way into the final product, I’m listed as a contributor.

Which is a very long way to say, I’m biased when it comes to Two Hearts That Beat As One.

Most readers come to Sonia H. Davis as an adjunct to their interest in her second husband, H. P. Lovecraft. Her memoirs of their marriage shed light on a critical period of Lovecraft’s life, and fans and scholars alike sought her out for what she could give them about him. Yet that interest never manifested in any profitable form. Lovecraftian scholarship and publishing in the 1930s-early 1970s was almost entirely a small-scale endeavor, dominated by amateurs and small presses like Arkham House that sometimes seemed more labors of love than businesses that could produce actual revenue. There was no major biography of Lovecraft released during Sonia’s lifetime, though every major biography since has depended at least in part on her memoirs.

Pretty much no one seemed interested in Sonia’s own story. Until Monica Wasserman, that is.

Sonia’s autobiographical manuscript is, first and foremost, the story of her life. Born to Jewish parents in Ukraine (then a part of the Russian Empire), the loss of her father, her travels to the United Kingdom and then the United States, the new family her mother made, her need to work at a young age, marry at a young age, to become a mother, a successful businesswoman, an amateur journalist…long before she met Lovecraft, Sonia lived a life worth telling about. Her story is the story of many immigrants that came to the United States, living by her wits and the sweat of her brow, striving for education to better herself, dreaming of her own business and financial freedom, and yes, even of love.

While Sonia is very honest in her autobiography, there are things she doesn’t talk about very much. This is where Monica added footnotes, stitched-in material from The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft and other autobiographical writings, to fill in some of the gaps. The result is more complete than just the individual works by themselves would be; the formatting by Helios is carefully done so it is easy to see at a glance when another text is “pasted-in,” and perhaps most importantly, in a way that preserves the intent of the book:

To tell Sonia’s story in her own words.

To appreciate Monica’s work, it is important to realize that Sonia desperately needed an editor. While some of her autobiographical writings proceed in a fairly linear manner, she had a tendency to hop around in time, or to put down sudden thoughts and recollections as they occurred to her, and there is much that might be forgotten (or omitted) when writing for a general audience decades later. We see little of her daughter, Florence Carol Greene, who grew up to be the journalist Carol Welde, for example, though we know their relationship was fraught and eventually irrevocably sundered. Endings seemed to be particularly difficult for Sonia; she struggled to wrap things up. The raw manuscripts aren’t unreadable, but they benefit immensely from someone taking the time and care to put them in order and to clarify a few obtuse points with cogent endnotes.

Monica put in the work so that the reader can access Sonia’s story more easily.

Two Hearts That Beat As One is, as of the moment it saw print, the definitive text on Sonia’s life. In a format accessible to both scholars and casual readers, it provides a unique glimpse into the life of a woman who suffered, strove, and finally achieved much of what she hoped for—love, a degree of economic comfort, and purpose—with her third husband, Nathaniel Davis. In time, old age would take this all away. All lives end, and the last chapters are rarely pleasant. Here, at last, Sonia is the star and subject of her own story, not a brief and shadowy chapter in H. P. Lovecraft’s.

After a successful crowdfunding campaign, Two Hearts That Beat As One is available both as a standard edition and a collector’s edition (with handsome slipcase). Helios House has made a beautiful, well-laid out project that does great service to Sonia’s text and Monica’s scholarship and hard work bringing this project together.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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