Arthur Machen
Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, "The Great God Pan". It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and consequently sold well, going into a second edition.
The Great God Pan
In writing the novella, he tried to "pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and terror that [he] had received" while visiting those ruins. Machen felt that he had "transliterated [the feeling] clumsily" in "The Great God Pan", elaborating: "I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams with fire and works in clay." Dennis Denisoff said that Machen's decision to make Helen Vaughan the child of a Welsh woman and a pagan figure "parallels Machen's own authorial self-identity as one arising from not only his Welsh ancestry but also pagan myth."