Authors

Spiritualist authors, many of them women, covered a wide range of topics in their publications: messages from the Spirit World, women’s rights, science and healing, essays, fiction, and poetry. The latter decades of the 19th century saw a robust market of Spiritualist print. The Year-Book of Spiritualism for 1871 reports that “[t]he past year has been one of great activity in Spiritualistic literature,—in the number of new works issued from the press, and their circulation. The demand steadily and rapidly increases; and new editions of many books out of print have been called for” [1]. Spiritualism’s rapid growth may have been intrinsically tied to the new print entertainment industry and mass book market [2].

A particular characteristic of Spiritualist writing is the common use of spirit authorship. One of the ways mediums communicated with spirits was through “spirit writing” (also called trance writing or automatic writing). While in trance, mediums would write out spirit messages by hand or through a planchette (a precursor to the ouija board), or speak the words of spirits while someone else transcribed. Mediums who published books of spirit authorship explained in the opening pages that the words were those of the spirit, not themselves. Sometimes these spirits were famous figures—Benjamin Franklin, John Bunyan, Thomas Paine—giving the words extra authority. Sometimes they were Spiritualist friends who had passed to the Spirit World. And sometimes they were individuals not connected to the medium.

This practice blurs our idea of “authorship.” For Spiritualists, this was a fluid, collective concept. But it gave women mediums an opportunity to express themselves through print. In her work on the medium Hester Dowden, Helen Sword points out that “a medium like Dowden becomes a ghostwriter in two senses: ostensibly allowing ghosts to write through her, she in fact writes through them” [3].

Here are a few examples of women’s Spiritualist and progressive books printed in California by women's printing organizations. Follow the links to read these books online for free.