Bookstore Trawling with brisingamen and <user site="livejournal

[truepenny]

My haul:

• Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America.
  
• Coward, Rosalind. Female Desires: How They Are Sought, Bought and Packaged.
  
• Driesch, Hans. Psychical Research.
  
• Home, D. D. Incidents in My Life.
  
• Lea, Henry C. Superstition and Force.
  
• Russ, Joanna. The Two of Them.
  
• Spencer, Wen. A Brother's Price.
  
• Strouse, Jean. Alice James.
  
• Tiedemann, Mark W. Remains.
  
• Vicinus, Martha, ed. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age.
  
• Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European cultural history.
  
• Zwinger, Lynda. Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality.

From which you may deduce that I am beginning, in a haphazard fashion, to research Victorian women's relationship with the Spiritualist movement and the occult. There's a novel in there somewhere.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Have you read Sarah Waters' Affinity, in which a Victorian lady becomes involved with a medium who was imprisoned after a seance went wrong?

[aranel.livejournal.com]

As you may already know (well, do know if you have read the book in question), A.S. Byatt's Possession deals with this subject, among others. Which is not to say, of course, that your possible novel is or should be in any way impeded by Byatt's treatment of the subject.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

When I am to the stage of actually researching--instead of flitting about in an undisciplined fashion--I will remember that. Thank you!

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

May I suggest "In Search of White Crows" an excellent study of 19th century spiritualism. Damn, I can't find the book, so I don't know the author. I'll poke the library a little and see what turns up. I did a paper on Spiritulism for grad school. Are you interested in American, British, or both?

[jenett]

along with books on this general theme - Gregory Frost's "Fitcher's Brides" (Fairy tale series: obviously, that one set in the early spiritualist stuff.)

I'm curious about your comments on A Brother's Price, too. (I read it, liked it, despite being aware there are some glitches in the worldbuilding and plotting that are of types that normally annoy me more. That is a compliment, btw, to the book otherwise being quite engaging.)

[larryhammer]

I'm curious what you make of A Brother's Price.

---L.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

With Madam Blavatsky as the protagonist?

[voske.livejournal.com]

I can also recommend The darkened room : women, power, and spiritualism in late nineteenth century England by Alex Owen.