Customer Reviews

The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Firstly, I am a Spiritualist medium, healer, teacher, lecturer and minister. I am currently the Associate Pastor of the Colby Memorial Temple in Cassadaga, Florida. So I admit to coming to this review a bit biased in Maggie's favour.

I gave this book four instead of five stars because I felt it was somewhat unbalanced. And from the other reviews, I feel justified. Ms. Stuart has given us a tremendous picture of life in the last half of the American Victorian Era. There were many issues facing women and Spiritualism got into the middle of many of them. All the reviewers read that Maggie debunked Spiritualism, but none of them seem to read that she recanted that confession and told us why. Also remember that many of the norms and mores of the time got in the way of her life. She was also tremendously effected by her love for Dr. Kane. Has there never been a young girl confused, coming into puberty? I think not.

Anyway, the book is basically well written. I have already used it as a basis for a Lyceum Lecture(Our version of Sunday School). The greatest value of the book is in its exposing readers to a little known period of American history and the involvement of religion in that period. Other good books are:
RADICAL SPIRITS by Anne Braude and TALKING TO THE DEAD, and LILYDALE. Also the truly interested reader would be remiss without reading the HISTORY OF SPIRITUALISM by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (See my review).

This is an intriguing biography of Maggie Fox who along with her sister, Katy, started the spiritualist movement that talked with the dead during the middle of the eighteenth century in Hydesville, New York. Nancy Ruben Stuart makes a sound argument that teenage Maggie bored with the small town after living in Rochester created the weird knockings that she and her sibling claimed were deceased people communicating through them. The word of what the Fox sisters could do spread and people came from miles around for a reading. Married sister Leah saw a chance for them to make money and soon a movement spread across the country. However, at nineteen years old Maggie fell in love with Arctic explorer Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, who demanded she stopped what he considered a nasty hoax, spiritualism. In her sixties she confessed that spiritualism was a fraud although she continued to give séances.

This biography is fascinating as it provides a deep sense of time and place (upstate New York was a hot bed for cult activities) as well as a powerful look at Maggie and her family. The author contends that spiritualism still has a hold on people in the twenty-first century with New Age movements like the psychic hotline. Readers will appreciate this strong glimpse at a teen who shammed a nation.

Harriet Klausner

The Reluctant Spiritualist is non-fiction but reads like a fast-paced whodunit. The mystery is whether spiritualism is a fact, or a fraud cooked up by two bored teenage girls in a farmhouse in mid-nineteenth century upstate New York.

Drawing extensively on diaries, correspondence, and literature of the times, Nancy Rubin Stuart paints a vivid portrait of the meteoric rise and tragic downfall of Maggie and Katy Fox, women who gave birth to the modern spiritualist movement. It all began when the sisters learned to dislocate the joints of their big toes to produce "rapping" sounds in order to frighten their high-strung mother. Over the years, Maggie and Katy become so popular that they hold seances for world leaders.

Much of what Ms. Stuart documents is clearly fraud, but other instances of the sisters' powers, and that of other, mostly female "mediums", are inexplicable. Politicians and celebrites who were skeptics become converts, even while many crusade to expose trickery in the business.

This was one of the few occupations where Victorian women influenced society in large numbers, and Ms. Stuart does a good job of exploring spiritualism's sexual overtones. Many famous gentlemen attended seances held by Maggie and Katy because they were attracted to them. One humorous incident involved a bunch of drunken U.S. senators in a hotel room with the two young women. Things haven't changed much in the last 150 years!

Against this backdrop is a poignant, star-crossed love story involving Maggie and the great Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane. Kane is a firm non-believer who gets Maggie to give up rapping, at least for a while.

To the end, Ms. Stuart takes no position on the validity of spiritualism, presenting extensive evidence, pro and con, down to our own time. Some critics have said that the author's even-handedness detracts from her work. I consider her impartiality a strength. It is best to let the reader make up his or her own mind about a subject that defies empirical proof. The Reluctant Spiritualist is an important book that raises hard questions about the immortality of the soul.

This is a well-told biography that reads like a novel. The author traces the suspect but glamorous path that turned Maggie Fox and her sisters from ordinary Victorian women into celebrities and started the spiritualist movement. The social history is fascinating and the love letters between Maggie and her Arctic explorer are wonderful and romantic. A great biography.

I really enjoyed this book. I couldn't put it down because of the interesting story the author tells and the way she told it. I had no idea that Maggie Fox was one of America's first mediums, as was her little sister Katy and that today's interst in mediums and spiritualism began in the 19th century. I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes stories about real women, as well as about the Victorian Era and its romances-- and of course, about mediums.

I love it when an author simply presents facts and doesn't try to make us feel the way they do. I found the book to be balanced in presenting the pros and cons - in presenting the genuine and the absurd. All while letting the reader decide.

For me, the biggest "tell" was not that Maggie herself claimed it all to be a hoax, but that in the middle of all her emotional hysteria, she never once herself contacted the "spirits." Where was Elisha? Her spirits should have been able to keep her informed.

I do believe in a life after. I do believe souls can and do come back and talk to us. Via dreams, via apparitions, what ever. And I do believe that there are people gifted in this kind of communication. I also believe it is a gift. As the bible tells us, as you have been freely give - so you should freely give. It is a horrid thing to charge people. And the really stupid "manifestations?" Please!

I do think more time should have been spent examining the people driven insane by it, or driven to suicide.

The writing was exceedlingly gripping. The author paints a very vivid picture. Look forward to more books.

Can you crack your fingers? Most people can. Can you crack your toes? That's a little rarer, but still not an extraordinary ability. Can you crack your toes and thereby enrich your family and start a new form of religion? That would be extraordinary, and the extraordinary story of the woman who did it is in The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox (Harcourt) by Nancy Rubin Stuart. Maggie Fox, and her sisters, were good enough at toe snapping (and the equivalent of ventriloquism, making people think the noises were coming from elsewhere) that they harnessed the snaps to spooky effect. They convinced first their mother and then much of the American public that the raps were simply the manner of telegraph that dead people use to contact those of us left behind here. It seems preposterous that the spirits, with all the resources of The World Beyond, would have to resort to such a system of communication, and indeed, after the Fox sisters got started, they and their imitators were able to show how spirits helped in such useful feats as tipping tables, writing in trances, producing yucky ectoplasm, or many other peculiar manifestations. Stuart acknowledges the eagerness to believe that is the great engine that powers such performances. Most religions teach that there is some sort of life after death, but many seek direct evidence of it. The spiritualists provided what passed as evidence, and what passed as comfort for the bereaved, and if Maggie Fox could crack her toes and say it was confirmation of life on "the other side", then there was a public eager to believe her.

She didn't set out on a career of spiritualism. She was fourteen years old in 1848, living in Hydesville, New York, when she and her sister started playing tricks on their mom. The agitated response of Mrs. Fox to their tricks and rappings convinced her that a spirit haunted the house. The word about the "spook house" spread, and when strangers, including journalists and clergymen, converged upon the farmhouse, Maggie was locked into a role. Her celebrity was taken over by her 34-year-old sister Leah, who learned the secret of how the "spirits" were being produced, and essentially blackmailed Maggie into performing for money (this is why Maggie can be referred to as "reluctant"). Leah organized séances in homes and eventually in larger venues like theaters in Rochester and then Manhattan. The pretty Maggie was wooed from spiritualism by the Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane, who secretly married her shortly before his death overseas. Maggie attempted to gain her legacy from him, but Kane's duplicitous family succeeded in keeping it from her. Impoverished, and prone to alcoholism, Maggie eventually exposed herself in 1888, either because of guilt or because of need of money. She appeared on stage in New York to tell 3,000 listeners, "I have been mainly instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too confiding public." She then took off her shoes and demonstrated the tricks of her toes. The demonstration was a sensation in the hall, but it failed to translate into sales for her book The Death-Blow to Spiritualism or into a lucrative tour. Spiritualists were, of course, outraged, and Maggie didn't mollify them when she retracted her confession a year latter. She never regained her previous fame before she died in 1893.

Stuart's book, the first full biography of Maggie Fox, is an important history of the founding of spiritualism. Her descendants, like John Edward and James Van Praagh, are still making money by contacting the dead, and it is useful to be reminded how the origin of spiritualism, fired by the hopes of bereaved families, was founded upon fraud. (Stuart tries for balance, and maintains, even against the evidence presented here, that the questions of authenticity among spiritualists remain "just beyond our grasp.") The book also is a reflection on women in nineteenth century America, as Maggie and her sisters had acquaintances who were in the women's suffrage movement; they themselves, however, used their fame as spiritualists to at least partially break out of the role of dependency and docility. For the most part, Maggie was trapped by her family into playing the role of fraud, which is sad enough, and she changed the history of humbuggery, which is sadder still.

Whatever your opinion about spiritualism and ghosts, this is a very interesting biography. Of course having an interest in ghost stories myself, I was already aware of the Fox sisters as a phenomenon. I had also run across Margrette Fox as an individual in a book I'd read on the ice ages which happened to include a section on the artic explorer Elisha Kent Kane. Miss Stuart's book, The Reluctant Spiritualist, puts all of this information into perspective making it a coherent tale. "Tale" is a good word for it, too. The lady's life was quite extraordinary. One might believe it to have been written by a depressed Jane Austin or by one of the Bronte sisters.

The book makes it clear that the rise and surprising persistance of spiritualism in the 19th century was a reflection of the social issues of the time, particularly the status women. Spiritualists like the Fox sisters acheived a much greater degree of independance than most women of the time did. A practicing medium could not only make a living, but an especially gifted one could make a small fortune and live a quite lavish lifestyle. She could meet famous and influential people, thereby achieving a great degree of social consequence herself. All of the Fox sisters--with the possible exception of Maggie herself--made advantageous marital liasons with well to do individuals who encouraged their activities. A move from a lower middle class rural background to an upper class lifestyle was hardly possible for most women. The average woman found herself circumscribed by rigid codes of behavior, confined to her home and family, poorly if at all educated, and at risk of poverty at the death of her husband should he have made little or no provision for her well being. The latter is very evident from the outcome of the relationship of Elisha Kane and Maggie and from the situation with Katie and her husband. It is probably no surprise that the spiritualist movement appealed to the followers of the women's movement of the time or that many spiritualists were also suffragettes.

It would appear that freedom and public attention came at a price, however, as both Maggie and Katie suffered from severe depression and alcoholism all their lives, ultimately dying of these afflictions. Society treated them and others like them with a marked degree of suspcision, if for no other reason than that they were women in the public eye, and women who did what they wanted, had money of their own, and socialized with whomever they chose. There was also the issues of "free love" and the equality of women, which titillated the less adventurous curious.

Although the effects of the Civil War on the persistance of spiritualism is mentioned, I'm surprised that the author did not discuss this topic more thoroughly. The death of so many men during that period created a huge market for the services of spiritualists and probably was the cause of it's popularity lasting well into the 20th century as well. Almost everyone at the time was religious to some degree and believed in the survival of the spirit. The opportunity to achieve a degree of closure after the loss of a family member during the war must have been almost irresistible. And who can tell to what degree the information received by the individual subscriber at the seance helped them through their grief? Might it not have been to at least same extent as that acheived by a modern grief cousellor or psychologist? Possibly better, since it suited the religious sensibilities of the times?

I think the book would make an excellant film. The characters are all very strong. There's an adventurer--Kane--to carry us off to the rigors of the artic. There is a tragic romance and the escape of Katie to England where she marries and has a family--if not happily ever after, as close as she, and probably anyone gets. Much is made by Artic exploring buffs of Kane and by Spiritualists of the Fox sisters, but together they create a major drama.

This book is a real page turner that beautifully delineates the dramatic story of the life of Victorian era medium Maggie Fox and her era. While it is a biography, Nancy Rubin Stuart's "The Reluctant Spiritualist" reads like a novel even as it describes the rise of spiritualist movement, Maggie's initial role in it and her thrilling, but ultimately tragic romance with Arctic explore Elisha Kent Kane. There's something for ever reader in this book--social history,engaging characters, a great love story, and of course, the ongoing question about the life of the spirit. A terrific read!

Wendy S.

It began as a prank where Maggie Fox and her sister rapped out messages from the 'spirit world' in 1948 and soon lead to a vast movement of believers in the otherworld - a movement Fox eventually denounced forty years later, revealing her hoax. Maggie Fox's life, prank, and phenomenon is revealed in The Reluctant Spiritualist, a powerful biographical coverage surveying not just her prank and its powers, but the famous people of her era who became engrossed in the promise of tangible evidence of an afterlife.