Spiritualism and women's writing

the long version

This original and imaginative study examines the influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on a variety of modern and contemporary female authors. It explores both the material and ghostly connections between women's writing - particularly the work of Mich le Roberts, A.S. Byatt, Victoria Glendinning and Sarah Waters - and the practice of mediumship in the nineteenth century. For the first time, it provides a sustained analysis of how and why the haunted world of Victorian spiritualism has been appropriated and reimagined in late twentieth-century fiction. In addition, it shows how many of the apparently unprecedented innovations of modernism are in fact already present in the rituals, performances and documents of the Victorian s ance. Supported by compelling archival research throughout, the book not only demonstrates how a unique selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts are bound together by phantasmal ties but also shows how spiritualism forces us to reconsider our wider understanding of history, narrative and the afterlife.