ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the historical rise, spiritual stakes, and literary impact of esoteric movements and new religions across the Victorian era. Encouraged rather than suppressed by secularization, syncretic belief systems such as Modern Spiritualism and Theosophy allowed spiritual seekers to forge newly personalized, and often wildly exotic, relationships with the numinous world; they also redefined the supernatural in innovative ways that novelists were able to exploit in their romance narratives. This process was nowhere more evident than in the case of reincarnation, a hitherto fringe belief that crossed over from the esoteric milieu into the mainstream fiction market in the 1870s where it then featured in some of the era’s most successful bestsellers. I demonstrate the literary reach and ideological versatility of reincarnationism through discussion of three late Victorian proto- and post-Theosophical novels: Mortimer Collins’s Transmigration (1874), Alfred Percy Sinnett’s Karma (1885), and Marie Corelli’s Ziska (1897).
