Selene of the Spirits [Hardcover]

Melissa Pritchard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1998

Set in the romantic world of Victorian London, Selene of the Spirits is the story of a beautiful young woman with psychic powers who acquires sudden fame as a medium in the spiritualist circles of the day. Just as precipitous is Selene fall from grace after the revelation of her love affair with a renowned scientist. Exiled to the Welsh countryside, Selene learns more about the spiritual, and carnal, side of life than she ever had in London, as she is transformed by the fulfillment of her love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A Victorian spiritualist and the scientist who is investigating her claims fall for each other in this captivating tale of love, fraud, parapsychology and sibling rivalry. Selene Cook is still a teenager when she and her sister, Octavia, are expelled from school for behavior prompted by the voices that haunt Selene. With the help of professional spiritualists who know how to create "manifestations," whether or not the spirits of the other world cooperate, the girls' ambitious parents soon parlay Selene's spiritualism into a thriving business and social gambit. Not to be outdone by her younger sister, Octavia does some parlaying of her own. Octavia's machinations and Selene's affair with Sir William Herapath, who conducts Holmesian experiments on her powers, end in Selene's exile to the Welsh countryside, where she rediscovers her spiritual side. Meticulous research, elegant style and genial acceptance of human nature make Flannery O'Connor Award winner Pritchard (Phoenix) a compelling narrator. Without rancor or pretentiousness, she probes the choices Victorian England offered young women craving independence and examines both the comedy and poignancy of the search for proof of an afterlife. Vivid minor characters (Selene's overreaching parents, Herapath's wronged taxidermist wife, the sisters' wealthy benefactor and his troubled daughter) enrich this brief novel with compassion and make it as haunting as its subject.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Grade 9 Up-Social history with a biographical slant. This text discusses what life was like for the middle and lower classes in 19th-century England and incorporates information about Dickens's life and how the period influenced his writing. The vocabulary is concise and uncomplicated and the writing is clear. This book is well organized and extensively researched. The informative black-and-white illustrations enhance the material presented. There's nothing new here, but the book is an excellent supplement to John Rule's The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750-1850 (Longman, 1986), David Thomson's England in the Nineteenth Century (Penguin, 1991), and Daniel Pool's What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew (S & S, 1993). Yancey knows her material and readers do not need prior knowledge of the subject to appreciate her engaging volume.
Adrian Renee Stevens, Beaver Creek School, West Jefferson, NC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 230 pages
• Publisher: George Braziller; 1st edition (November 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865380945
• ISBN-13: 978-0865380943
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,912,720 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Melissa Pritchard is an award-winning short story writer, novelist, essayist and journalist. The author of seven books of fiction and one biography, she has received numerous awards, including the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Carl Sandburg Award,and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has been frequently anthologized and cited in The Pushcart Prize, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Award, Best American Short Stories and numerous other anthologies. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Howard Foundation Fellowship at Brown University, the Hawthornden Foundation, Midlothian Scotland, and the Bogliasco Foundation, Liguria, Italy. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in journals and magazines such as O, The Oprah Magazine, the Nation, The Paris Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, Agni, The Southern Review and the Gettysburg Review. Two of her books have been New York Times Notable Books, one was selected as a Chicago Tribune Best Books, another as a Barnes and Noble 'Discover Great New Writers' selection. National Public Radio chose one of her collections for their Annual Summer Reading List, and she has served as a judge for both the Flannery O'Connor Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. A founder of the Sr. Airman Ashton Goodman Fund, benefiting the Afghan Women's Writing Project www.awwproject.org, Melissa teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. Her personal website is www.melissapritchard.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Atmospheric, thoughtful and witty, July 27, 2007

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selene of the Spirits (Hardcover)

Flannery O'Connor award-winner Pritchard mixes the academic's reserve with the artist's probing of character and the enthusiast's flights of fancy in this Victorian novel. Her research, as described in an afterward, combines all three with a generous dose of mystical coincidence.

Inspired by the love affair between a married scientist and his subject, psychic Selene Cook, the story centers on Selene's awakening powers. Daughter of a vulgar, ambitious, humorless woman and a lazy, sadsack father, Selene hears voices, suffers trances and reads unhappy futures in the faces of strangers.

The shape of her life is cast the day she loses her teaching position, consequently disrupting the education of her younger, plainer sister Octavia, whose heartfelt ambition focuses on intellectual recognition. Selene, too self absorbed to understand Octavia's deep resentment, follows her voices to a London spiritualist and finds solace in the structure and artifice of training to be a parlor medium.

A success on the séance circuit, Selene attracts the attention of a "spiritualist investigator" who exposes her most spectacular "manifestation" as a fraud. With the loss of her reputation and patron, Selene implores a respectable scientist, William Herapath, to authenticate her powers.

Herapath, captivated by Selene's more physical attributes but in financial thrall to his peculiar wife (who is caught up in the fad for taxidermy), conducts their love affair with a mixture of passion, venality and cowardice. It can only end badly, with Selene, pregnant and alone, exiled to rural Wales. Here she discovers a fleeting peace in the reawakening of her spiritual side, although unable to break the cycle of earthly tragedies and betrayals, culminating in the sad end revealed in the book's prologue.

Pritchard's characters are vivid, their humanity timeless, their attitudes and actions shaped by the proprieties of their time. Her unobtrusive research (Victorian "scientific" methods, the occult, taxidermy) shows in the details. The writing is elegant, with touches of dry comedy.

There is a feeling of distance, of biography, reinforced by the use of Selene's diary entries, letters and occult newspaper accounts. While this subverts suspense, it lends authenticity to the account and maintains its aura of mysticism. Thoughtful, well-written and entertaining.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entrancing page turner, December 1, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Selene of the Spirits (Hardcover)

Melissa Pritchard continues to amaze me with her beautiful use of the English language, enticing plot line, realistic characters, and beautiful poignancy. As with her former works, she captures the reader instantly, and will not let go, until long after you read the last page. Along with this bok, I strongly reccomend her novel entitled "Phoenix", a story of a girls youth on the road. Her books read like movie scripts, complete with complex characters and visual illustration that comes to life within her written words. I believe her to be one of the foremost authors in the world right now, and implore you to discover her fascinating world, that takes you all the way from the brightest light, to unimaginable darkness. Two thumbs up!