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A highly original study that examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers, and believers during the golden age of spiritualism in the late Victorian era, The Darkened Room is more than a meditation on women mediums—it's an exploration of the era's gender relations. The hugely popular spiritualist movement, which maintained that women were uniquely qualified to commune with spirits of the dead, offered female mediums a new independence, authority, and potential to undermine conventional class and gender relations in the home and in society. Using previously unexamined sources and an innovative approach, Alex Owen invokes the Victorian world of darkened séance rooms, theatrical apparitions, and moving episodes of happiness lost and regained. She charts the struggles between spiritualists and the medical and legal establishments over the issue of female mediumship, and provides new insights into the gendered dynamics of Victorian society.
The gruesome, unsolved murders by the first media-sensationalized serial killer, Jack the Ripper, continue to fascinate after more than 100 years. However, from the beginning the truth has been obscured by a fog of half-truths and misinterpretations. This book aims to clear up the misinformation and myths surrounding Jack the Ripper. The author uses a critical review of the kind that is now used to scrutinize unsolved crimes. He re-checks, re-examines and re-evaluates the facts, conjectures, newspaper accounts, eyewitness reports and official pronouncements. The book includes: descriptions of the locations where the bodies were found; detailed histories of the victims; profiles of key police officials and examinations of police procedures, investigations, blunders and errors; details of prevailing myths about the case; an evaluation of all the chief suspects; comprehensive analyses of the existing literature; discussions of written communications ostensibly sent by the Ripper; and an argument identifying the most likely suspects.
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Explores the connection between medicine and gothic literature examining disease, psychiatry and supernatural in the nineteenth century.