“Our Old Houses Are Full of Ghosts”: Gothic and Utopian Visions in Violet Tweedale’s Theosophical Writings

Abstract

Violet Tweedale, granddaughter of the notable Scottish publisher Robert Chambers of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, became a prominent figure in the spiritualist and subsequent theosophy movements when she formed a close association with H. P. Blavatsky. Writing in the transitionary period between Victorian spiritualism and the Edwardian popularity of the esoteric and Eastern-inspired theosophy religion, Tweedale’s writings navigate between the true apparition narratives of Ghosts I Have Seen (1919) and the Arthur Conan Doyle-endorsed Phantoms of the Dawn (1928), with their emphasis on scientific inquiry championed by 19th-century psychical researchers, and novels such as Lady Sarah’s Son (1906) and The Beautiful Mrs. Davenant (1920) that emphasise the moral and philosophical promises of Blavatsky’s doctrine of spiritual progress. Tweedale’s turn-of-the-century supernatural writings illustrate the cultural and geographical shifts—from Tweedale’s native Scotland in the last decades of the Victorian era to the legacies of a Russian mystic’s New York-founded Theosophical Society—that influenced spiritualists’ increasingly global post-WWI relationships to both scientific futures and gothic pasts.

Scottish-born novelist and supernatural writer Violet Chambers Tweedale (1862–1936), granddaughter of the prominent publisher Robert Chambers of W. & R. Chambers publishing house, was brought up amongst Edinburgh’s literary society at the turn of the twentieth century. The popular periodicals produced by the Chambers brothers, including Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Chambers’s Papers for the People, and Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, were an institution of the Victorian popular press. In Ghosts I Have Seen, an autobiographical account, Tweedale recalls assisting her father, Robert Chambers, Jr., with his literary work “at the old business house” of W. and R. Chambers, and it is with a certain reverence for “the cheap and good educational literature” of the Victorian age that she pursues her own literary career, characterised by ghostly reminiscences and mystical novels, in the socially and politically volatile period after the Great War (Tweedale 1919, pp. 19, 24). While Tweedale’s spiritualistically inclined and, at times, decadently gothic writings might seem a far cry from the practical and edifying literature of her grandfather’s journal, it is worth noting that Robert Chambers also wrote extensively on subjects from Scottish folklore in, for example, Traditions of Edinburgh (1825), to speculative science in his controversial evolutionary treatise, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Given her family background and early influences, including her grandfather’s forays into spiritualist séances, Tweedale’s writings negotiate between the traditional orthodoxies of her youth in her native Scotland, imbued with an atmosphere of gothic castles and Celtic occultism, and the modernising cosmopolitan ideas represented by the advent of new forms of popular science and religion, such as spiritualism and theosophy (Tweedale 1919, pp. 70–71).1 The utopian ideals suggested by the esoteric teachings of the Theosophical Society, founded by Russian mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875 on the principle of spiritual progress or reincarnation, in some ways superseded the ‘old-school’ spiritualism of the Victorian age. Yet, Tweedale’s fictions promoting this new “religion of the millennial future” maintained the gothic sensationalism that both drove spiritualism’s popularity and contended against the longstanding censure of the realist press toward lowbrow, feminised forms of writing (Tweedale 1924, p. 8).

This paper examines the complementary roles of science, including speculations about the future and the nature of the spirit, and the supernatural, including gothic fiction and folklore, in Tweedale’s writings, which have been largely overlooked in studies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century supernatural fiction. Only recently has there been any sustained attention on her work in a Spanish-language chapter, “Fantasmas vistos y no vistos. Espiritualismo y ocultismo en la ficción de Violet Tweedale,” by Pulham (2023). Pulham analyses the interplay of fact and fiction in Tweedale’s works, as well as identifies additional influences in fin-de-siècle decadent and psychological narratives. Poetry written by Tweedale for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal is briefly examined by Chapman (2022) in “Locating Scottish Cosmopolitanism in the Digital Archive.” Tweedale’s 1917 novel The Heart of a Woman receives mention in Trotter’s (1998) chapter “Lesbians before Lesbianism: Sexual Identity in Early Twentieth-Century British Fiction.” Her theosophical treatise The Cosmic Christ (1930) is noted in Pokorny’s (2022) article “The Ascended Confucius: Images of the Chinese Master in the Euro-American Discourse,” and Owen (2004) identifies Tweedale as a “minor writer” initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a magical order inspired by Masonic societies, whose members also included Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen (p. 61). There are no sustained studies in English on Violet Tweedale’s works, despite her close association with notable contemporaries such as Helena Blavatsky and Arthur Conan Doyle, who praises Tweedale’s writings in his preface to her 1924 book of spiritual and supernatural experiences, Phantoms of the Dawn. Bridging categories such as social problem and sensation novel, and realist autobiography and gothic ghost story, Tweedale’s writings offer an additional link between the golden age Victorian ghost story and the weird or occult fictions, particularly what Ferguson (2021) identifies as the “theosophical tale of terror,” characteristic of early twentieth-century horror writers. On the threshold between science and the supernatural, between study and story, the works Ghosts I Have Seen (1919), Phantoms of the Dawn (1924), and Found Dead (1928), a short story collection that draws on her reportedly true experiences, suggest a form of proto-modernist fragmentation responding to the fractured state, socially and spiritually, of post-war Britain. Novels such as Lady Sarah’s Son (1906), The Beautiful Mrs. Davenant (1920), The School of Virtue (1923), and The Green Lady (1921) also negotiate between conservative nostalgia and hopes for social progress by revelling in gothic pasts and promoting utopian futures.

In introducing Violet Tweedale, it is fitting to quote the praise of Arthur Conan Doyle, who, a popular fiction writer and spiritualist spokesperson himself, acknowledges both her literary talent and professional credibility not only in his prefatory remarks to Phantoms of the Dawn but also in his own spiritualist collection of essays, The Edge of the Unknown (1930).

In Mrs. Tweedale’s Ghosts I Have Seen, a book which is far more thrilling than any sensational novel, and which can only be matched by the companion volume, Phantoms of the Dawn, will be found several descriptions of fauns, satyrs, and even in one case of a troop of centaurs, which are picturesque and arresting, if not entirely convincing. I know Mrs. Tweedale personally—she is the daughter of one of the famous Chambers brothers of Edinburgh, and I am aware that she is the last woman in the world to exaggerate or trifle with truth.

(Doyle 1930, p. 187)

Doyle refers to two of Tweedale’s non-fictional, autobiographical books on the supernatural, Phantoms of the Dawn and Ghosts I Have Seen. These psychological studies-cum-ghost story collections largely follow the formula of earlier apparition narratives, which included Victorian collections of true ghost stories that lent themselves to the evidentiary case studies of nascent spiritualist or psychical research.2 Spiritualism was hailed as both a religion and a science by its proponents, who sought to legitimise reports of ghostly encounters by drawing on scientific discoveries of electro-magnetism and other invisible natural forces, exchanging feminised superstition and feeling for masculine objectivity and reason. Doyle’s endorsement is twofold: he not only attests to Tweedale’s credibility as a witness and realistic writer—her “very sane and critical judgment” or masculine rationalism (Doyle 1930, p. 70)—but also, given his own literary reputation, he affirms the “thrilling” and “sensational” quality of her fictional writing, reaffirming the links between Tweedale’s autobiographical works and gothic fiction. The literary merit of her fantastical works is affirmed in the same breath as her authority is linked to a rational outlook, straddling the Victorian divide between gendered modes of writing.

Doyle’s evaluation demonstrates what Ferguson (2019) suggests is the “implicit argument” of popular occult fictions: that “occultism has an entertainment as well as spiritual value—and that these two forms of value might be inextricably linked” (p. 102). If Doyle’s celebrity reputation as a fiction writer helped to spread the spiritualist message when he took up the cause, then it was Blavatsky’s charismatic persona and ‘weird’ writings that helped popularise the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky linked the wisdom of the spiritual master or “Mahatma” with a talent to engage popular audiences with literature. Blavatsky was a writer of both fiction and nonfiction herself and a mentor to Tweedale. Thus, the authority of theosophical writers, including Blavatsky and Tweedale, is derived from their affinity, particularly as women writers, for fictional and fantastic modes in the tradition of what Moers (1976) has famously termed “the female Gothic.” As Annie Besant, Blavatsky’s successor and social activist, claimed, “H.P.B. … was distinctly in favour of persistent and public propaganda… [S]he was never weary of saying, an attempt was made by the Masters of Wisdom to touch the heart and brain of mankind, and They patiently sent messengers, century after century, to sow the good seed’” (qtd. in Morrisson 2007, p. 11). These messengers ostensibly include the writers of genre fictions, which were not only likely to appeal to popular audiences but were also especially accommodating to the supernatural themes and motifs germane to mystical and occult philosophies.

In her supernatural writings, Tweedale draws on a lineage of psychical research begun in earnest by Victorian spiritualist researchers whose investigations led to the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. Echoing the defences of earlier spiritualist proponents criticised for their credulity and feminine hysterical temperaments, Tweedale laments the masculine scepticism and materialism that excludes evidence of subjective “personal experience which is purely, intellectually convincing” (Tweedale 1924, p. 66). As Owen (1989), Basham (1992), and Braude (1989) note in their respective studies of nineteenth-century spiritualist and occult movements, the champions of mediumship were often women whose gender excluded them from the forms of cultural authority associated with the mainstream scientific and professional establishments. By repudiating this rationalist hegemony, spiritualism effectively “validated the authoritative female voice” (Owen 1989, p. 6). As mediums and spiritual interlocutors, women claimed authority through their subjective and experiential access to esoteric knowledge often mediated through written forms particularly associated with women, such as automatic writing, popular science, pedagogical literature, and ghost stories.3

The sister movement of theosophy, with its emphasis on the elite knowledge of the adepts, in some ways mitigates the gendered tensions that made spiritualism, with its emotionally charged séances, particularly susceptible to criticism by rationalist sceptics. Prothero (1993) observes that “the Theosophical Society began as an elite attempt to reform spiritualism from above” and, as such, “amounted to … an attempt to effect a paradigm shift … from a tradition of mediums (predominantly female) who passively channeled spirits of the dead in the darkness to a tradition of adepts (predominantly male or, in Blavatsky’s case, ostensibly androgynous) who worked in full light” (pp. 198, 204). However, theosophy does not eschew the experiential and subjective. Blavatsky’s own literary endeavours, including Isis Unveiled (1877) and her posthumously collected gothic short stories in Nightmare Tales (1907), constitute “a form of outward-looking dark feminist fantasy which recognizes that the claims of European enlightenment have been over-sold and under-realized” in the female Gothic tradition that is deeply intertwined with the supernatural output of the spiritualist movement (Ferguson 2021, p. 551). Similarly, Tweedale’s combined spiritualism, with its endorsement of the traditionally spooky supernatural, and theosophy, with its esoteric magic, remain rooted in the literary tradition of the Gothic and in the subjective, intensely imaginative qualities of the fantastic.

Tweedale’s destabilising writings contend with the social upheaval caused by the widespread casualties of the Great War. Traumatic war losses gave rise to an atmosphere of collective mourning that, contends Owen (2006), instigated “an ongoing search for spiritual meaning” fuelled by mourners’ “yearning for spiritual regeneration and a renewed sense of the richness and wonder of life” (pp. 176, 173). By competing with secularising “demystification or disenchantment (‘Entzauberung’),” esoteric religions answered this need by channelling ancient esoteric knowledge to, as Marco Frenschkowski (2021) suggests, “mak[e] the whole planet a sacred place again” (p. 152). Tweedale encapsulates this sense of the mystical potential of wartime devastation in Phantoms of the Dawn when she describes air raids she personally witnessed.

Tweedale (1924) records the “spectacle” of London’s destruction (p. 207).

  I was able to see, hear, feel London falling into that profound, waiting silence that had such a quality of awe and mysticism.

  It was as though all that had been clear and true had receded into the remote hint of a vast invisibility of inexorable darkness, causing the brain to reel with the instability of things …

  The atmosphere became sinister. The pall of the preternatural, the ghastliness of the inexplicable mingled with some protean darkness and strangeness within.

(Tweedale 1924, p. 208)

The passage begins by invoking the mystical through the silences that transcend language and, by extension, objective experience. The promise of this meditative state, however, is shattered by the atavistic and, indeed, gothic character of the Zeppelins’ intrusion. The description anticipates the apparent de-evolution of the terrified “Gnomelike” citizens, “demonised, bestial with ferocity,” into an occult “protean” past (Tweedale 1924, p. 212). Yet, if it presages an apocalyptic event, the preternatural silence in Phantoms of the Dawn, whose title foretells a second coming, also provides scope for spiritual raptures and regeneration: “At such mystic hours all things seemed possible. One passed behind the veil of sense, and caught a glimpse of other world vision. The material world dissolved in the solvent of pure sensation, and the soul stood forth in its naked and pristine elements” (Tweedale 1924, p. 211). This “other world vision” with its utopian immateriality is achieved through Gothic-Romantic terror and sublimity as well as what Roukema (2018b) terms the “technologies of mediumship,” namely, spirit communication or “spirit telegraphy” with the unseen world (p. 197). Like the encroaching airship, a harbinger of both destruction and modernity, the mystical experience recovers occult superstitions with modern ‘tech’ harnessed by capable operators, such as Tweedale, the author-clairvoyante.

Tweedale continues to stress the powers of concentration in Phantoms of the Dawn, claiming, “Silence! Waiting! We think of those two states as inaction, yet all mental activity may be termed concentration. Concentration is a mighty force possessing an intense reality” (Tweedale 1924, p. 210). The passive receptivity of the medium is here transformed into an active force. This “mental activity” is also evidence of what Tweedale terms “New Thought, or Divine Science, or Mental Science” (Tweedale 1924, p. 234). Tweedale cites the judge and comparative religionist Thomas Troward, who states in his Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science that the subjective mind is the “fountain of perpetual Life, which is continually renovating the body by building in strong and healthy material”; further, “From mental healing it is but a step to telepathy, clairvoyance and other, kindred manifestations of transcendental power” (Troward 1909, p. 81). To support her arguments for the efficacy of Mental Science in Phantoms of the Dawn, Tweedale reinforces her point with outside scholarship by utilising Toward’s discursive progression from psychology to extrasensory perception. Thus, Tweedale engages with the mystics’ overarching legitimating project, using what Morrisson (2007) calls “quasi-scientific terms of validation” to replicate the credibility of scholars from the medico-scientific and religious professions (p. 4).

The discourse of Mental or Christian Science healing leverages moral and religious teaching alongside healthcare work, each deemed particularly appropriate for nurturing feminine natures. For example, in Tweedale’s 1906 novel Lady Sarah’s Son, a Dowager Duchess channels her religious devotion into a practice of mystical healing to minister to faraway patients, “the penetrating power of mind being the only medicine required” (p. 351). The Dowager Duchess demonstrates an aptitude for healing, a trait shared with other women who have historically functioned as caregivers, midwives, traditional herbalists, and, during the war, as professional nurses.4 The efficacy of these cures in Lady Sarah’s Son depends both on an intuitive sympathy with the patient and on knowledge and mastery of a skilled practice. Anxieties about disease proliferate in Tweedale’s novels, with the onus of cure or prevention primarily placed upon women. In Lady Sarah’s Son, Sylvia Legarde, an aristocratic young woman, is alarmed by her family’s history of genetic disease and receives the advice from her husband-to-be that “a mother has only to will that her child shall be born healthy … for that result to come to pass” (Tweedale 1906, p. 83). In another novel, The Beautiful Mrs. Davenant, young Letty Thorne is left to tend to her dying uncle, despite that “she had performed no V.A.D. work like most English girls. She knew practically nothing of illness, and now she was deprived of the support of a doctor” (Tweedale 1920, p. 239). Yet, functioning as a ministering angel, Letty knows “instinctively” how to ease her uncle’s passing, and, elsewhere in the novel, the eponymous Mrs. Davenant remembers doing “her bit in a hospital war depot” and “what so many of her sex had done in brilliant actual war service” (Tweedale 1920, pp. 91–92). As the medicine blends with religious sensibility and moral responsibility, the capability that the women exhibit in matters of bodily health lends credibility to these characters’ mystical and occult beliefs regarding spiritual health and progress.

Tweedale reinforces this sense of mastery in Phantoms of the Dawn, alluding to an authoritative stance typically reserved for masculine observers. “Masters,” writes Tweedale, “possess an enormously extended consciousness, and they are able to watch over their disciples. They keep in mental touch with them through an extension of consciousness we cannot understand” (Tweedale 1924, p. 229). While not necessarily claiming mastery for herself, Tweedale does elsewhere stress a cultural link between knowledge of the supernatural and “Scotch blood,” as well as her own calling to take up mediumship (Tweedale 1919, pp. 165, 68). Additionally, Tweedale was a disciple of Blavatsky, whom she reverentially describes as a guru in Ghosts I Have Seen. Tweedale recalls that, in addition to providing “guidance” to a devoted following of intellectuals, Blavatsky channelled a range of supernatural phenomena. In Ghosts I Have Seen, Tweedale recounts materialisations she witnessed in Blavatsky’s London villa.

The air about me was ringing with vibrations of weird, unearthly music, seemingly as much around me as it was above and behind me. It had no whereabouts, it was unlocatable. As I listened my whole body quivered with wild elation, and the sensation of the unforeseen …

  Who was the player, and what was his instrument? He might have been a flautist, and he played with a catching lilt, a luxurious abandon that was an incarnation of Nature. It caught me suddenly away to green Sicilian hills, where the pipes of unseen players echo down the mountain sides, as the pipes of Pan once echoed through the rugged gorges and purple vales of Hellas and Thrace.

(Tweedale 1919, p. 59)

The passage anticipates the mysticism in Tweedale’s description of the bombing of London in Phantoms of the Dawn, as the strained senses give way to transcendent thought infused with the terror and elation of the approaching unknown. The primordial strain also recurs in the figure Pan, the Greek satyr-god of the wild. Just as Tweedale elsewhere states that the “Masters therefore offer Brotherhood to all nations and creeds” (Tweedale 1924, p. 240), Blavatsky promoted “the idea that a single universal wisdom tradition lay behind all religions and mythologies” (Chajes 2020, p. 89). Chajes (2020) goes on to explain that the “secret doctrine” espoused by Blavatsky was essentially pagan: “Paganism was the perennial wisdom tradition” (p. 90). The pagan dimension also offers a connection to the literature of the Celtic Revival, which resulted in the incorporation of pan-Celtic lore into mystical and occult philosophies inasmuch as the mythology of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales was believed to retain “vestiges of an ancient wisdom” (Taylor 2022, p. 103).

Tweedale herself hailed from Scotland, where she noted the gothic character of its castles and a preponderance of seers. In Ghosts I Have Seen, she observes, “Our old houses are full of ghosts, the atmosphere is saturated with the tragic history of the past, the very skies seem to brood in melancholy over the soil, where so many wild bloody scenes were enacted. To the Psychic, Scotland is a land not yet emerged from the dour savagery of the past” (Tweedale 1919, p. 83). In line with Wright’s (2007) definition of the Scottish Gothic mode, Tweedale is concerned here with the “careful excavation of Scotland’s past” and “minutely detailed attention” to artefacts—such as castles and oral histories—that are “contested sites of authenticity and authority” (p. 76). This antiquarian mode also helps to reconcile the ghost story with the scientific mode of the folklore anthropologist.5 Tweedale articulates further associations with Celtic and pagan occultism, for example, in her allusion to “The Great God Pan,” the title of Anglo-Welsh author Arthur Machen’s 1894 novella. Pan was a subject that, Tweedale says, “novelists of distinction at once began to write upon,” herself included—occult dealings with the satyr feature in her 1914 novel An Unholy Alliance6 (Tweedale 1919, p. 241). In addition, Tweedale sets her 1923 novel The School of Virtue in South Wales, where the mining village of Pentry Gwyn hosts a renowned medium, Evan Davies, based on the real-life Evan Powell, whose séances Tweedale attended alongside Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle. The descriptions of both the fictional Davies and the real-life Powell emphasise the medium’s working-class roots in the coal pits and his “childlike” and “boyish” appearance, indicating the perceived primitiveness of his country—rural and national—origins that allow him to access the arcane wisdom of spirit matters (Tweedale 1923, p. 258; Tweedale 1924, p. 46). Her attribution of supernatural powers to the primitive ‘folk’ is an example of the tendency of herself and her mentor, Blavatsky, to privilege “popular mythology and folk memory” in their regional writings (Banerjee 2011, p. 618). In another example, Tweedale titles her novel The Green Lady after an entity from Scottish folklore: the glaistig, or Green Maiden, which appears in legends as half-woman and half-goat, similar to Pan. Thus, folklore, rather than being dismissed as superstition, becomes an additional indicator of expertise tied to knowledge of particular locales.

In Ghosts I Have Seen, Tweedale suggests that the god Pan was impressed on the public consciousness as “the forerunner of the devil’s reincarnation” (Tweedale 1919, p. 243). This brief suggestion of Satanic influence ties into not only the reincorporation of Celtic and pagan folklore but also the proto-feminist aims of early occult movements. Faxneld (2012) notes that not only was there “considerable overlap between Theosophy and the women’s movement,” but also “the shock value of Satanism … serve[d] a pedagogical function” to challenge depictions of Eve as the original sinner in Blavatsky’s foundational theosophical text, The Secret Doctrine (Blavatsky 1893, pp. 222, 226).7 Tweedale acknowledges a heavy debt to The Secret Doctrine, which she read “seven times in seven different keys” (Tweedale 1919, p. 53). It is directly after her description of meeting with Blavatsky in Ghosts I Have Seen that Tweedale reinforces the proto-feminist foundations of her mysticism. Tweedale moves into a description of her social work in a women’s shelter in the East End slums,8 where she lived “during the dread visitation of ‘Jack the Ripper’” in 1888. It was under these conditions, she states, that she “developed into a convinced Suffragist” (Tweedale 1919, p. 64). Given the publication of Ghosts I Have Seen in 1919, her follow-up reminiscence that “[i]t is thirty years ago since I became a convert to Spiritualism” places Tweedale’s religious conversion contemporary with her adoption of the Suffragettes’ cause (Tweedale 1919, p. 66).9 While spiritualism more often embraced a feminine passive nature in opposition to an active masculine principle, in line with Victorian gender roles, theosophy’s theory of spiritual evolution would ultimately efface sexual difference. Theosophical teachings posit that “[s]piritually as well as physically, the children of the New Age would conform less and less to established notions of the appropriately masculine and feminine” (Dixon 1997, p. 432). In addition to exploring women’s shifting social positions at the fin de siècle, navigating between progressive political enfranchisement and more traditional forms of spiritual authority, Tweedale’s commentary on gender and androgyny hint at the speculative utopias suggested by Blavatsky’s linking of the technologically advanced “Atlantean” and the primaeval “Hermaphrodites” as precedents for mankind’s final evolution in The Secret Doctrine (Blavatsky 1893, vol. 1, p. 346).

In Lady Sarah’s Son, a novel whose first chapter declares that “mind supersede[s] matter” and “the law of evolution forbids stagnation,” the multi-millionaire Blumenthal studies the “curious transmutation” of the “female soul” into a “slowly developing third sex” (Tweedale 1906, p. 107). He muses, “How many there are who might be men and are not women …. The preponderance will have the short body and long legs, the flat breasts of the man. The majority will have as much down upon the lip as a youth of twenty” (Tweedale 1906, p. 107). Although Blumenthal attributes this change to an “anti-natal life” in which the “womb is banished,” suggesting a note of censure, those who exhibit these androgynous traits are often portrayed in a positive light by Tweedale. In Ghosts I Have Seen, Tweedale describes “a dark man with a small black moustache, and smoking a very long cigar. He was neatly dressed in a long dust coat, and on his smooth black hair he wore a brown Homburg hat. In one dark eye was a single monocle, through which he regarded me with a mild surprise” (Tweedale 1919, p. 200). This moustachioed, cigar-smoking man turns out to be “a cultured gentlewoman, … a woman dressed exactly to resemble a man” (Tweedale 1919, p. 201). This person, with whom Tweedale spends a train journey “chattering most amicably,” is fictionalised as the very capable Mrs. Carlton, mother of the male love interest in The Beautiful Mrs. Davenant. Mrs. Carleton wears, like the Russian delegate, “a holland suit … cut on the severest masculine lines, and the soft shirt and neat tie were the same in style and pattern as those of her son” (Tweedale 1920, p. 19). She has, likewise, a “brown Homburg hat” that reveals an “exceedingly smooth head of closely cropped iron-grey hair,” and she eyeballs her new tenant, the widowed Mrs. Davenant, approvingly through a “single monocle” (Tweedale 1920, p. 19). The refined behaviour and accomplishments of these masculine women (the first is a member of the Austrian Imperial family, and Mrs. Carlton manages the affairs of Great Glentworth estate in lieu of her husband and son) are recorded with a note of admiration that brings to mind the charismatic attraction of Blavatsky, who was known by the masculine sobriquets “HPB” and “Jack.”10

Extending the liminality and boundary-crossings represented by androgyny, Tweedale’s adventure with her monocled companion on the train in Ghosts I Have Seen culminates in a strange encounter with non-human “elementals,” “half-man, half-animal” (Tweedale 1919, p. 204). The non-human appears multiple times throughout Ghosts I Have Seen: a familiar summoned by Black Magic takes the form of a “Faun or Satyr,” as does an ominous entity seen by Lady Henry Grosvenor on an old Roman road; Lilian, Countess of Cromartie, encounters a “half-goat, half-hare” in Windsor Great Park; and a Grand Duchess and her husband see a herd of “half-men, half-horses” that Tweedale speculates inspired Algernon Blackwood’s book The Centaur (Tweedale 1919, pp. 120–22). Tweedale rationalises such creatures as “failures of creation still extant” or “races fallen out of evolution” (Tweedale 1919, p. 123). Ferguson (2012) notes how spiritualist fiction at the fin de siècle attempted to “biologise” the supernatural in its turn to “scientifically aspirational versions of literary realism” (p. 173). Such aspirations toward “naturalistically justified” conceptions of mystical and occult ideas are evident in Tweedale’s merging of folklore, anthropology, and natural philosophy (Roukema 2018b, p. 191). Moreover, Tweedale’s allusion to vestigial evidence of prior “races” aspires to scientific credibility, simultaneously trading on religious authority by echoing the terminology of Blavatsky’s cosmology concerning the seven “Root Races” of human evolution expounded in The Secret Doctrine.

Returning, for a moment, to Blumenthal’s discourse on gender in Lady Sarah’s Son, the cynical millionaire calls the evidence of androgynous sexual development “a strange, weird freak stamped with the sterility of hermaphroditism” (Tweedale 1906, p. 107). While his language is pejorative, it also recalls Blavatsky’s meditations on the Sixth Root-Race, the penultimate evolution of mankind: “All we know is, that it will silently come into existence; so silently, indeed, that for long millenniums shall its pioneers—the peculiar children who will grow into peculiar men and women—be regarded as anomalous lusus naturæ [freaks of nature], abnormal oddities physically and mentally” (Blavatsky 1893, vol. 2, p. 464). Blavatsky’s evolutionary cosmogony is too complex to delve into here; however, two prior evolutions are relevant to the proto-feminist depictions of gender fluidity in Tweedale’s works—the third root race, Lemurian, and the fourth, Atlantean.11 In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky posits that the egg-laying, intersex Lemurians were the last stage of the “ethereal hermaphrodites” in the image of the “Gods of primaeval mankind [who] were ‘male and female’” (Blavatsky 1893, vol. 2, p. 143). Atlanteans emerged as the sexed individuals that created a technologically advanced society; however, their progress also precipitated humanity’s downfall “to the very bottom of materiality in its physical development” (Blavatsky 1893, vol. 2, p. 465). Chiming with themes of both gothic and sci-fi narratives in which protagonists contend against powerful and often unknown encroaching forces, theosophical mythology presents stories about the corruption of “Atlantean magic” and the ultimate “destruction of Atlantis by misusing powers over nature” to criticise nineteenth-century society’s “esteem of technological advancement” and spiritual neglect (Frenschkowski 2021, p. 149). Materiality, in terms of both reliance on technological or industrial machinery and dependence on the physical senses, stalls the purely intellectual progress of spiritual ascendance. What Tweedale refers to as a “third sex” in her novels provides evidence for Blavatsky’s conjecture that “the present Race is on its ascending arc; and the Sixth will be rapidly growing out of its bonds of matter, and even of flesh” (Blavatsky 1893, vol. 2, p. 465). The effacement of material difference not only legitimates arguments for greater equality of the sexes but also supports allied levelling causes such as socialism and religious universalism, characteristic of Tweedale’s reformist attitude toward social issues in her novels.

In Tweedale’s novel The Green Lady, it is Colonel Challoner’s mission to reject his genteel inheritance and establish a Brotherhood of Youth “powerful enough to command universal peace, security and harmony, and which will be absolutely free from prejudice of race, colour, or creed” (Tweedale 1921, p. 245). His social cause, admitting of women and men, also rejects capitalist and aristocratic class distinctions. Given the proletarian “universal hatred with which the very rich are now regarded,” says Challoner, “We are all Socialists now” (Tweedale 1921, p. 231). Similarly, in Lady Sarah’s Son, the mystic tradesman, Ivan Devereux, inherits Blumenthal’s vast wealth but heeds the advice of the working-class foreman of his antiques shop: “Millionaires are for use, not ornament, like say a jail or say other public institution … [T]hey’re public characters, they belong to the nation” (Tweedale 1906, pp. 335–36). The foreman’s hint about distributing inherited wealth ties into Ivan’s scheme to build non-denominational houses of worship for public use across London, where working people can meditate and, thereby, spur spiritual progress in preparation for future karmic evolutions. Yet, in Lady Sarah’s Son, Ivan’s focus on preparing for the next life ignores the material needs of the working-class populace: “In our present state of evolution,” he argues, “there are tens of thousands who … have no desire for better dwellings, whose one interest in life is the getting of bread to eat” (Tweedale 1906, p. 343). Casting his gaze toward a future of spiritual perfection where men “soar above the sordid needs of the body,” Ivan expresses a view held by both social reformers and theosophists: what Beaumont (2010) identifies as a “compensatory Utopian promise,” paradoxically combining “hope[s] of active social transformation” with “despondent dream[s] of passively escaping society altogether” (p. 223). This interplay of realism and escapist fantasy is integral to the aim of popular theosophical and spiritualist writings to balance between missionizing and entertainment.

It is already noticeable how the fantastic seeps into Tweedale’s nonfictional writing, for example, in her meeting with the androgynous Russian delegate on her train journey through Bohemia in Ghosts I Have Seen. This episode introduces the spectacle of gender fluidity and prefaces the incursion of the monstrous “elementals,” both folkloric creations and anomalous evolutionary specimens. In addition to the dualisms—male/female, East/West, human/animal, and reality/fantasy—apparent in this Bohemian adventure, there is also a tension between imagination (subjective) and technology (objective). Besides the locomotive itself, Tweedale is particularly anxious about the officials’ handling of her “aluminum traveler’s typewriter, enclosed in, and fastened down to a leather case,” accompanied by a “large leather dispatch box, containing several chapters of a new novel,” and “a small Russian ikon” (Tweedale 1919, p. 197). The presence of the typewriter and the Russian officials’ suspicion of the unfamiliar machine’s “powers” is compounded by the presence of the obscure “ikon” and doubts about Tweedale’s own professional credibility, as she notes how “their expression says plainly enough, ‘You don’t look capable of writing out a laundry bill, far less a novel’” (Tweedale 1919, p. 198). The accumulation of uncanny artefacts here recalls the occult associations of the ever-present typewriter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In addition to a gendered dimension that positions Mina, like Tweedale, as the unlikely author, Mina’s mechanical typewriting replicates and disseminates the gothic narrative with a far-reaching power that is allied with the supernatural “reproductive process that makes vampires” (Wicke 1992, p. 476). Tweedale’s traveller’s typewriter suggests a similar function of exploiting the popular modalities of mass print culture to proliferate occult, esoteric ideas. This function was germane to the promotion and sustainment of the theosophical and spiritualist movements, which generated their own print-driven subcultures through the proliferation of decentralised doctrines in subscriber magazines, such as London-based Light, Boston-based Banner of Light, and Blavatsky’s own The Theosophist. Not only did popular occult texts have a proselytising and propagandistic function, but they also conducted essential “boundary work” in attempts to expand the purview of mainstream science and “legitimate occult knowledge in the dominant public sphere” (Morrisson 2007, p. 4). Tweedale’s gothic fictions, which also exhibit elements of sensationalism (in, for example, the bigamist plot of The Beautiful Mrs. Davenant) and the social problem novel (in the reformist schemes of Ivan Devereux in Lady Sarah’s Son), take advantage of scientific possibility and social transformation to meld informed conjecture with imaginative fancy in ways that tend to also validate these feminised fictional modes.

Scientific analogies proliferate in Tweedale’s work, as in the work of other spiritualist and theosophical writers who sought to establish the experimental validity of associated fringe sciences, such as mesmerism and psychical research. By selectively gathering evidence from research conducted on other unseen forces, such as electromagnetism and telegraphic communications, occultists “could emerge from the proleptic knowledge space occupied by professional scientists …, freely applying scientific imagination” to expand the boundaries of the plausible (Roukema 2018b, p. 193). Tweedale, for example, uses scientific metaphors to compare the invisibility of both natural and spirit forces. In The School of Virtue, Tweedale suggests that the clairvoyant powers of the immobile Duchess work “much as telephony operates. The ether waves, which pass through stone walls … do not become perceptible to the physical senses until they are caught by special apparatus attune with their vibrations” (Tweedale 1923, p. 310). Another favourite analogy links such vibrational activity with atomic theory, or, in the case of manifestations, meteorology. The amateur psychic researcher in the short story “The Old Grey Hall,” collected in Found Dead, explains to a sceptical client that spirits materialise “as water vapour flows through clouds,” and, he elaborates, “bodies are a mass of vibrations. If I could magnify my hand sufficiently I would see a mass of vibrating atoms between which I could pass. That’s sound science” (Tweedale 1928, p. 173). Whether or not his science is sound, his rhetoric convinces his sceptical client that not only is a haunting plausible but also that investigation is necessary.

The exchange between psychic researcher and sceptical client in “The Old Grey Hall” characterises the discursive strategy in occult and esoteric fictions, where the rationalist rhetoric serves “to create [a] liminal state of wonderment and doubt by shattering the reader’s perception of barriers between natural and supernatural” (Roukema 2018a, p. 114–15). Consistent with the “positive potential” of rebranding heterodox beliefs associated with superstition, Tweedale’s ghost stories adopt gothic tropes in line with Ferguson’s point that such fictions have “a vested interest in reversing … sensationalist stigmatisation of the occult” (Ferguson 2019, p. 99; Ferguson 2021, p. 542). In “The Old Grey Hall,” the seer-researcher’s ability to both embody and respond to a “sympathetic and patient spirit” repairs the injustice perpetuated by a cruel father’s theft of his wife’s jewels and restores a lost will to his disinherited daughter (Tweedale 1928, p. 211). The seer adopts logical discourse only to subvert it when he reasons, “Touch wood to fend off evil. Wood was once a tree. The most highly evolved living creature in the vegetable kingdom. Orchids have tricks, but a forest giant is a mighty force for good or evil” (Tweedale 1928, p. 185). From superstition to natural science and back again to fairy lore, the seer-researcher’s scientific judgments enact an exoteric function to convince his client, but it is his occult imagination that enables him to fathom the mystery: “Few people,” he says, “seem to be aware that imagination is our greatest creative faculty—the foundation of every great invention and discovery” (Tweedale 1928, p. 186). His assertion suggests the innate utility of gothic and fantastic modes not only for disseminating stories but also for prompting intellectual inquiry.

At the end of Phantoms of the Dawn, Tweedale offers this disclaimer: “I have dealt with many such facts in these pages, and I make no apology for failing to supply plausible explanations. The man of science knows how far beyond his ken are the ultimate relations, and the knowledge of the spiritual is no mere affair of the intellect. What folly it would then be for a writer of my modest calibre to attempt to define the undefinable” (Tweedale 1924, p. 306). The alternations between fact and fiction—“facts” paired with implausibility, spirituality superseding “intellect,” the “man of science” compared with the modest “writer”—characterise how Tweedale augments her supernatural writing with the legitimating language of science while, at the same time, eschewing the limitations of rational “plausib[ility]” to raise ghosts from gothic pasts in her autobiographical accounts and escape into progressive utopian futures in her mystical novels. Tweedale defends the supernatural in her theosophical writings by applying scientific rhetoric; however, the final disavowal of mastery, certainty, and reason in favour of the inarticulate sensations and uncertain futures of spiritual affairs casts down the masculine persona of the rationalist investigator to present a narrative mode receptive to both fact and fiction.