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141 Elizabeth Schleber Lowry Modern Spiritualism Studies Have Changed book reviews 141 Elizabeth Schleber Lowry Invisible Hosts: Performing the Nineteenth-Century Spirit Medium’s Autobiography, Albany: suny Press, 2017. xi–157 pp. isbn13: 978-1-4384-6599-9. Modern spiritualism studies have changed dramatically since 1989, when Alex Owen lamented that historians had ‘virtually ignored the existence of the female believers who played such a vital part in spiritualist practice’ in order to pay a ‘disproportionate amount of attention’ to spiritualist men.1 Now, thanks to the pioneering work of scholars like Owen and Anne Braude, the case is arguably reversed. Indeed, few studies of Anglo-American spiritualism pub- lished over the last decade have not taken women as their central focus: wit- ness Marlene Tromp’s Altered States (2006), Tatiana Kontou’s Spiritualism and Women’s Writing (2009), and Jill Galvan’s The Sympathetic Medium (2010), among others. It requires no small amount of courage to step into this once barren but now crowded field, and for that Elizabeth Schleber Lowry’s Invisi- ble Hosts is to be praised. It shifts focus from the séance to the autobiographic practices of female mediums, examining how four prominent female sensi- tives used their life writing to buttress their spiritual authority and legitimize their entrance into the public sphere. Lowry’s argument that spiritualism pro- vided women with an admittedly compromised form of liberation from tradi- tional gender roles draws upon and largely replicates Owen’s earlier conclusion; Lowry’s version of this thesis is solid, albeit not particularly startling. While Invisible Hosts will incrementally advance the field of spiritualist gender stud- ies, it has not been crafted to radically transform it. The four medium autobiographies studied here are Leah Fox Underhill’s Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (1885), Nettie Colburn Maynard’s Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? (1891), Emma Hardinge Britten’s Autobiogra- phy of Emma Hardinge Britten (1900), and Amanda Theodosia Jones’s Psychic Autobiography (1910). The brevity of this primary source list accounts for the slimness of the volume, and is warranted, Lowry argues, by the fact that these are the only four book-length female medium autobiographies published in the second half of the nineteenth century. This justification feels somewhat procrustean, cutting off the often generically hybrid works of female-authored spiritualist testimonial which include significant portions of autobiography— Georgiana Houghton’s Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance (1881) and Florence Marryat’s There is No Death (1891) come to mind—not to mention the many 1 Alex Owen, The Darkened Room, ii. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15700593-01801008Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:04:19AM via free access 142 book reviews shorter autobiographical essays and interviews which were a staple of the spiri- tualist press. The study takes a similarly restricted approach to previous studies of female spiritualist autobiography such as Miriam Wallraven’s Women Writ- ers and the Occult in Literature and Culture (2016)2 and Women, Madness, and Spiritualism (2003), Roy Porter, Helen Nicholson, and Bridget Bennett’s edited collection of the life writings of three prominent Victorian women spiritualists incarcerated for their beliefs. Somewhat astonishingly, neither of these studies are even mentioned here. As a result, Invisible Hosts can sometimes feel claus- trophobic in its approach to the wider field, shutting down rather than opening up the tricky question of what exactly constitutes “life writing” for subjects who, whether female or male, did not believe in death and often rejected conven- tional narrative forms. The book is structured into seven short chapters which examine all four of the primary autobiographies in relation to different historical currents and dis- courses. Chapter one compares spiritualist autobiographies to their evangelical counterparts, examining the contrasting ways in which the two justify women’s entrance into the public sphere. The second chapter demonstrates how the book’s medium-autobiographers strove to absolve their spiritualist belief from the taint of Free Love by endorsing a discourse of Real Womanhood associ- ated with purity and honesty. This leads in Chapter three to a discussion of their vexed relationship with Protestantism and in Chapter four to their per- formance of domesticity. Chapter five analyses the autobiographers’ canny and often commercial manipulation of male patronage to gain credibility, while Chapter six treats their simultaneous rejection of and dependence upon bio- logically determinist theories of gender. The study concludes with a final chap- ter which surveys the literary defences offered by its subjects for their travels on behalf of spiritualism. There is much solid historical scholarship within these contents, and new- comers to the field will appreciate Lowry’s clarity of expression and useful summations of key events in spiritualist history. Yet the brevity of the chap- ters prevents them from developing polemic force, and as such their sequence can feel arbitrary rather than the necessary result of argumentative impera- tive. One longs for Lowry to offer a bolder and more provocative thesis that would bind all these parts together, or at least justify the order of their place- ment. Invisible Hosts instead favours safely denotative readings of its chosen 2 Wallraven’s book includes an expanded version of her 2008 article, ‘“A Mere Instrument” or “Proud as Lucifer”? Self-Presentations in the Occult Autobiographies of Emma Hardinge Britten (1900) and Annie Besant (1893).’ Aries – Journal for the Study of Western EsotericismDownloaded from 18 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2018) 127–152 09:04:19AM via free access book reviews 143 primary texts, offering only modest correctives to previous scholarship when indeed such critiques come at all. This argumentative timidity is perhaps understandable in a first book, and it is to be hoped that Lowry’s subsequent scholarship will reflect the greater confidence that her considerable historical knowledge warrants. In other in- stances, however, the study’s claims are not too cautious but rather too blunt, particularly in respect to the alleged uniqueness of certain kinds of practices to female mediumship. We hear, for example, that external endorsement was more important for female than male mediums because the former “engen- dered more mistrust,”3 and that this assumed duplicity led to women more frequently being tied up in eroticized ways that visualized their supposed natu- ral passivity. The problems with these claims, of course, is that they attempt to cordon off what were in fact universal practices. Many autobiographies by male mediums, most notably D.D. Home’s Incidents in My Life (1863), are just as if not more saturated by external testimonials as those produced by Lowry’s four sub- jects; they too constantly required other voices to assert their authenticity. Fur- ther, the period’s most notorious literary accounts of fraudulent mediumship, including Robert Browning’s “Mr Sludge, Medium” (1864) and Confessions of a Medium (1882), which Lowry herself cites, all focus primarily on male spiritu- alists; the cheating medium was figured as a man no less than a woman in the period’s cultural imagination. Further, the contention that male mediums were less intrusively or even erotically bound during tests also seems at least moot; the illustrations of the Eddy brothers’ trials in Henry Steel Olcott’s People from the Other World (1875) certainly suggest otherwise. This is not to say that the plights of male and female mediums were identical throughout the nineteenth century, nor even that they necessarily deserve equal page space in contempo- rary historical scholarship. Rather, it is to point out that differences of gender in the spiritualist milieu were intersected by others of class, religion, race, sexual- ity, literacy, and social capital, vectors which subsequent waves of spiritualism and gender studies might profitably probe, expose, and complicate. Christine Ferguson University of Stirling [email protected] 3 Elizabeth Schleber-Lowry, Invisible Hosts, 65. Aries – Journal for the Study of Western EsotericismDownloaded 18 from (2018) Brill.com09/26/2021 127–152 09:04:19AM via free access 144 book reviews References Braude, Anne, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Boston: Beacon Press 1989. Britten, Emma Hardinge, Autobiography of Emma Hardinge Britten, Stansted: snu Publications 1996. Galvan, Jill, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communi- cation Technologies, 1859–1919, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2010. Houghton, Georgiana, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance, London: Trübner & Co. 1881. Jones, Amanda Theodosia, Psychic Autobiography, New York: Greaves Publishing 1910. Kontou, Tatiana, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo- Victorian, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2009. Marryat, Florence, There is No Death, New York: National Book Company 1891. Maynard, Nettie Colburn, Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? Or Curious Revelations from the Life of a Trance Medium, Philadelphia: Rufus Hartranft 1891. Olcott, Henry Steel, People from the Other World, Hartford, ct: American Publishing Company 1875. Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, London: University of Chicago Press 1989. Porter, Roy, Helen Nicholson, and Bridget Bennett
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