ABSTRACT
There Is No Death is a prominent example of the ways in which private and often painful life stories entered the public domain through, and because of, the advocacy of spiritualism. For critic Mark Morrison, the fin-de-siècle periodical and print culture had placed spiritual practices ‘at a curious intersection between the private and personal and the flamboyantly public’.2 Marryat is a perfect example of this ‘intersection’, using ‘her well-known name and … public reputation’3 to justify sharing with her readers her own participation in séances. Active in spirit circles, popular author, one-time editor of the London Society and contributor of articles to spiritualist and non-spiritualist ephemera, Marryat’s cross-disciplinary involvement also illustrates how the power of the press was harnessed to serve
psychic power and how, in her case, psychic power boosted her publicity. 4 Contrary to her relatives’ belief that, following publication of the book, she would be ‘dubbed a madwoman, or a liar, and that [her] novels would suffer in consequence’, Marryat avowed ‘my literary name has not suffered in any way from my audacity; on the contrary, the book has been received with more enthusiasm than anything I had ever written before’.5 It is interesting to note here that Marryat’s relatives direct their concern towards the harm that a spiritualist publication might wreak on her public persona, and not on the implications it might have for her personal reputation.
