The Victorian and the Romantic by Nell Stevens

Author:Nell Stevens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

I sift through the various pieces of writing I have put together in a Word document called, optimistically, “thesis.docx.”

Recently I have been working on a chapter about Spiritualism. One of the things the nineteenth-century artists and writers did when they were together in Rome was hold séances. They would sit down in darkened rooms, in the presence of self-proclaimed “mediums,” and try to contact the dead. William Wetmore Story thought he might himself have the power to channel spirits through his pen in a practice he called “spirit writing.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning attested to seeing apparitions—disembodied hands, a wreath of flowers that floated through the air and landed on her head—in séances. Harriet Hosmer encountered ghosts in Rome: she wrote to friends about having a conversation with her maid one morning, and learning later that the servant had died in the night; she described a little sprite who ran laughing through her bedroom and out into the sunlight. John Ruskin attended séances in which he demanded to speak to the spirits of dead painters: “I want to speak to the spirit of Veronese!” he instructed his medium. “Won’t I cross-examine him!” I found all of this quite moving in the source material—the efforts they made to reach the unreachable, their yearning to be friends with long-gone predecessors—but by the time I have passed it through the filter of my own academic prose it seems devoid of interest. Still, I include it, together with some introductory paragraphs about Rome and the conditions it provided the expatriate artists who lived there, in my upgrade submission.

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