“There Is No Limit to the Effect of Mind upon Matter”: Lettice Galbraith’s Spiritualist Challenge to Victorian Medical Orthodoxy

Abstract

The literary career of Lettice Galbraith (1859–1932) coincided with a transformative period in British intellectual history, when the boundaries between scientific rationalism and occult epistemologies were being vigorously contested. This paper argues that Galbraith’s supernatural fiction represents a sharp challenge to Victorian medical science, using Gothic tropes to expose its deeply gendered structures of power. Situating her work within what Alex Owen has termed “modern enchantment”, it contends that Galbraith does not merely use the supernatural as a metaphor for social critique, but treats spiritualist practice as a legitimate methodology, a way of knowing that privileges embodied experience, and the testifying power of the material world over the cold, isolating rationality of institutional orthodoxy. Through a close reading of “In the Séance Room” and “The Ghost of Vittoria Pandelli”, and by employing a theoretical framework that combines feminist theory with new materialist perspectives, this analysis demonstrates how Galbraith’s stories reconfigure the séance as a ‘feminist counter-laboratory’. In this space, women—both as mediums and as spectral presences—reclaim agency from male dominated medicine and psychiatry. Matter itself becomes an agential force: objects, sounds, and even atmospheres intra-act with human participants to produce truths that medical authority cannot access or suppress. Ultimately, Galbraith’s stories deliver a powerful and enduring claim, that systems of power designed to silence and erase will be undone by the vibrant presence of the material world itself.

1. The Spectral Subjectivity of the Woman Writer and Victorian Cultures of the Occult

The literary career of Lettice Galbraith (1859–1932) coincided with a transformative period in British intellectual history, when the boundaries between scientific rationalism and occult epistemologies were being vigorously contested. Our understanding of Galbraith’s own life is fittingly, somewhat spectral; what we know comes primarily from Alastair Gunn’s recent reappraisal of her work (Gunn 2023). Born Lizzie Susan Gibson in Yorkshire on 27 January 1859, she moved to London with her mother and turned to writing to earn a living. After publishing anonymously in 1885 and 1888, she achieved recognition with the collection New Ghost Stories dated 1893. As Gunn notes, “[t]he elusive Miss Galbraith never inhabited any hallowed hall of the literary scene, had few contacts in the publishing world, and wrote entirely as diversion. But, unknown to her, she left a legacy in her short supernatural fiction” (Gunn 2023, p. 189). Galbraith’s literary project emerges as a quintessential product of what Alex Owen has termed “modern enchantment”, a cultural moment in which “late-Victorian and Edwardian women and men became absorbed by metaphysical quests, heterodox spiritual encounters, and occult experimentation” in their search for “unorthodox numinous experience in a post-Darwinian age” (Owen 2004, p. 7). This epistemological shift was not merely esoteric, but fundamentally social: occult practices, as Owen and others have shown, functioned as radical experiments in reimagining gender, class, and even ontological boundaries (see Kontou and Willburn 2012, pp. 1–16). Indeed, this cultural moment might be better understood through the lens of what Lori Branch identifies as the key premise of a postsecular condition, characterized not by the disappearance of religion but by its fragmentation and recombination into new, heterodox forms. Its defining features include “the erosion of the secular/religious binary and the knowledge/faith distinction on which it is based” (Branch 2016, p. 92), alongside the crucial realization that to view secularism as an ideology is to see that it “has operated as an invisible and insufficiently examined set of assumptions” (Branch 2016, p. 95). Galbraith’s literary project emerges from this epistemic turmoil, where the authority of institutional science was constantly challenged by alternative ways of knowing. Channelling the postsecular vitality of Spiritualism, she articulates a focused feminist critique that adopts Gothic tropes to expose and confront the deeply gendered structures of power within Victorian medical science.

This period saw the ghost story mature into a distinct and highly popular genre, a development in which women writers played a central and defining role. From its earliest days “the ghost story has been a genre dominated by women” (Edmundson 2018b, pp. 69–70) who cultivated it as a unique space to articulate their complex position in a patriarchal society, a position characterized by what we might call ‘spectral subjectivity’, simultaneously present yet unseen, audible yet disregarded1. This made the genre a privileged means for women to explore “their ambiguous status as the “other” living “in a state of in-betweenness”, and to safely examine, and at times release, the “not so angelic impulses” that Victorian society publicly denied them (Dickerson 1996, p. 8). Ultimately, the ghost story became a vessel for what Victoria Margree and Bryony Randall consider a broader project of using the supernatural as “a way of both expressing and containing anxieties” related to their social experience (Margree and Randall 2012, p. 228), a trend that reached its peak in the 1890s when, as Emma Liggins notes, “[g]endering the supernatural” became a dominant creative mode for women writers (Liggins 2022, p. 178).

This paper argues that Galbraith’s supernatural fiction represents a sharp challenge to Victorian medical science; to fully appreciate her intervention, it is essential to situate her within the community of female contemporaries who similarly turned to the ghost story as a form of social critique. Galbraith belongs to a prominent group of writers such as Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), Charlotte Riddell (1832–1906) and B. M. Crocker (1847–1920), who turned to the ghost story in the 1880s and 1890s, attesting the popularity and commercial success of the genre at that time (Margree and Randall 2012, pp. 227–28)2. Galbraith’s work is firmly grounded in this tradition and in the subversive potential of “vengeful female revenants” who return to right “some wrongs done to them” (Edmundson 2018b, p. 69). Simultaneously, her work aligns with the darker, more transgressive and psychologically unsettling currents of the fin-de-siècle. Like her contemporary Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) who, alongside her important contribution to children literature, wrote tales that boldly place “a transgressive sexual act at the heart of a supernatural tale” (Freeman 2012, p. 101), Galbraith harnessed the genre’s potential to denounce patriarchal power and male violence. However, her unique contribution was to direct this combination of social critique and transgressive Gothic against the scientific discourses and pathologies of the male medical establishment, creating a sharp and enduring literary indictment.

This literary engagement with the spectral was often paralleled by a fascination with Spiritualism, which offered a metaphysical framework within which to establish a bridge between this world and the next, and bring the powers of one to bear on the other. Indeed, the spiritualist movement was itself closely associated with women, who were often regarded as natural mediums because of their supposedly intuitive and sensitive nature, a notion popularized by texts like Catherine Crowe’s The Night Side of Nature (Crowe 1848)3. However, while women predominated among mediums, it was primarily men who took on the task of investigating their abilities through scientific inquiry (Wynne 2006, p. 224). Organizations like the British Society for Psychical Research were heavily dominated by men, counting among their members notable figures as Alfred Russell Wallace, Oliver Lodge, Henry Sidgwick, and perhaps most famous of all, Arthur Conan Doyle—who would later write a two-volume history of Spiritualism, published in 1924. What this seems to suggest, therefore, is a gendered divide, which was reflected in the work of Victorian women writers, for whom mediumship offered further opportunities to introduce the reader to “‘purposeful’ specters” with “something to say” about their male-dominated world (Edmundson 2018a, p. 5).

This appropriation of the supernatural for subversive ends also signifies a critical evolution in the Female Gothic tradition which, as Edmundson Makala demonstrates, expanded throughout the nineteenth century into “something much more complicated and nuanced” than the conventional paradigm of the persecuted heroine. This development moved beyond simple revenge plots towards a more sophisticated critique, where revenants not only “exact revenge on their enemies”, but, more importantly, “actively warn other women” (Edmundson Makala 2013, p. 171), thus transforming the ghost story into a vehicle for communal caution and solidarity.

This, then, is the context within which the fiction of Lettice Galbraith operates. While her work initially appears to align with the model of vengeful specters—“In the Séance Room” (Galbraith 1893), for instance, tells of a murdered woman who returns to accuse her lover—Galbraith’s Gothic vision proves far more complex. Her supernatural tales reveal a world where both men and women become entangled in forces that expose the instability of Victorian epistemic and gender norms. In her fiction the séance room is transformed into a feminist counter-laboratory: a space where spiritualist practices appropriate and subvert scientific discourse to challenge the patriarchal hegemony over truth and evidence. In this sense, Galbraith meaningfully extends the core tenets of the Victorian Gothic: while she employs its framework to depict sources and effects of “psychological disturbances”, her innovation lies in sharpening its potential for “social critique” (Punter and Byron 2004, p. 30) into a precise tool for dismantling the very epistemic structures that enable oppression.

As a writer of the supernatural tale during the fin de siècle, Galbraith occupies a unique position at the intersection of three cultural phenomena: the medical establishment’s pathologization of female subjectivity, Spiritualism’s counter-hegemonic knowledge systems, and the Gothic mode’s capacity for ideological subversion. The aim of this paper is to advance a theoretical analysis which combines feminist critique and new materialist perspectives, to demonstrate how Galbraith’s stories—particularly “In the Séance Room” and “The Ghost of Vittoria Pandelli”—employed Gothic and spiritualist discourse to deconstruct the gendered power models underpinning Victorian scientific orthodoxy.

Galbraith’s work is fundamentally structured around the “porous” boundaries between science and the occult (Ferguson 2018, p. 4), presenting them not necessarily as opposing forces, but as competing systems of knowledge. Her stories suggest that the medical establishment’s rejection of Spiritualism was determined by the fear of the unknown, particularly when it granted women forms of knowledge and agency that challenged patriarchal control. To advance this critique, Galbraith strategically deploys Gothic tropes to stage confrontations between rationalist physicians and subversive spiritualist figures—both living mediums and vengeful specters. These encounters expose the fragility of medical authority and also dramatize its complete unraveling, revealing a scientific discourse whose power relies on the pathologization of the inexplicable, and on a profound resistance to female autonomy.

2. Spiritualism, Science and the Victorian Epistemic Crisis

Seeking to maintain its epistemological authority, the Victorian medical establishment tried to contain paranormal experiences through institutionalized discourses that framed Spiritualism as a dangerous form of collective psychopathology. The doctrine of Spiritualism was likened to an irrational contagion, a kind of mental alienation comparable to “analogous intellectual epidemics” (Burlet 1863, p. 552), such as demonolatry or vampirism. This rhetorical strategy effectively positioned it as both a public health threat, and a vector for social disorder. In an article from The Lancet by Samuel Wilks, Physician to Guy’s Hospital, “the follies of spiritualism” were considered scientifically unacceptable because “there are no forces in nature except such as are intimately associated with matter”4 (Wilks 1871, p. 630). Similarly, and some years later, the practices of Spiritualism continued to be denounced in The Lancet as “ridiculous extravagances”, “grotesque absurdities” and “specimens of cunning imposture”; moreover, “[a] belief in spirit […] would work dire mischief in the minds of the majority of the population, and if only as a probable factor in the total of insanity, the propagation of such a superstition by nefarious practices ought to be put down by the strong arm of the law” (The Lancet 1876, pp. 431–32). This tension between institutional medicine’s materialist reductionism and Spiritualism’s openness to immaterial agency reflects a broader Victorian crisis of epistemic authority, and confirms that “spiritualism and the occult are not viewed as having been on the outskirts of society and culture, but rather as culturally central for many Victorians” (Kontou and Willburn 2012, p. 1). Where physicians like Wilks dismissed spiritualist experiences as delusion or fraud, proponents articulated a counter-discourse that validated paranormal encounters as legitimate evidence, particularly for marginalized voices such as women and the working classes that were systematically excluded from scientific discourse. This resistance was not limited to private séances; it flourished in periodicals like The Spiritual Magazine or The Spiritualist, which promoted and debated spiritualist ideas. It also found support in publications dedicated to mesmeric science, which shared Spiritualism’s challenge to orthodox materialism—a theme also reflected in Galbraith’s narratives. In The Zoist, for instance, mesmeric proponents framed their practice as the pinnacle of rational inquiry: “The discovery of a new truth gives to the philosopher intense delight. The science of mesmerism is a new truth of incalculable value and importance”. For them mesmerism offered “the only avenue through which is discernible a ray of hope that the more intricate phenomena of the nervous system—of life,—will ever be revealed to man”. Far from being a vector of insanity, mesmerism was presented as a “glorious” scientific triumph that would quicken “the pulse in the bosom of philanthropy” (The Zoist 1849, p. 1). This fervent, almost religious language of scientific revelation highlights the profound schism within Victorian intellectual life: a battle between a rigid institutional materialism and heterodox fields that claimed to possess superior evidence and a more expansive view of nature’s law.

This struggle between recognized and dissenting knowledge systems was also worked out imaginatively in the literary sphere. Lettice Galbraith’s narratives function as a crucial case study. Her fiction reimagined spiritualist practices as appropriate modes of knowledge that privileged women voices, particularly women mediums and the spectral dead, while challenging established hierarchies of knowledge production. To analyze this subversive epistemological project, my investigation will employ a framework drawn from new materialist theory, and in particular Jane’s Bennett’s concept of “vibrant matter” and Karen Barad’s principle of “intra-action”. The new materialist framework may be relevant to the analysis of spiritualist literature, as it provides the critical foundation to recast the supernatural, viewing it as a negotiation of the agential potential inherent in all matter—the very potential that Victorian medical orthodoxy powerfully denied. More specifically, Bennett’s work challenges the passive view of matter, arguing that things possess a certain vitality or power, defined as the capacity of things to act as “quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett 2010, p. viii). This perspective is extended by Barad’s radical rethinking of agency, which she sees as a part of a relational process, stating that “agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world” (Barad 2007, p. 141). Together these theories provide the tools to demonstrate how Galbraith’s stories reveal the active role of nonhuman entities—haunted objects, spaces and material traces—enabling them to act as crucial witnesses and participants against patriarchal abuse. From this perspective the séance emerges not as a passive setting, but as what Dona Haraway would term a “situated knowledge practice” (Haraway 1988, p. 583), a dynamic field of intra-activity where truth is produced through embodied encounters rather than through detached, institutional forms of evidence-gathering. In Galbraith’s stories, mediums, spirits and participants engage in a “power-sensitive conversation” (Haraway 1988, p. 590) where knowledge claims are evaluated through their accountability to lived experience and communal witness. The situated knowledge practices of Galbraith’s séance offer a powerful literary instantiation of Haraway’s claim that “[t]he only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular” (Haraway 1988, p. 590). That “somewhere” is the séance room—a space where women’s voices, both living and spectral, assert their authority to testify truths that medical science cannot afford to acknowledge.

3. Haunted Assemblages: New Materialism in “The Ghost of Vittoria Pandelli”

Alastair Gunn’s recent scholarly recovery of Galbraith’s work in The Blue Room and Other Tales5 provides crucial textual evidence for this reassessment, demonstrating how Galbraith’s stories anticipated contemporary understandings of the relationship between mind and matter, while intervening in late-Victorian debates about science, gender and the occult. This theoretical framework finds its compelling narrative expression in the story, “The Ghost of Vittoria Pandelli”. While seemingly a conventional tale of supernatural obsession, it systematically deconstructs the very categories it appears to uphold, offering a complex exploration of spectral agency that evokes the new materialist concerns outlined above. At its heart, the story is about obsession: Christopher Marlowe is tormented by spectral visitations from Vittoria Pandelli, a dead woman who pursued him in life and who is now reducing him to hysteria, exhaustion, and a “paroxysm of terror” (140). Though married to Audrey, Marlowe is haunted nightly by Vittoria’s apparition. Audrey is distraught by his withdrawal from her, and one evening, when she discovers him kneeling before a chaise longue, begging Vittoria for mercy, she decides to leave him. Fortunately for Marlowe, a “specialist on mental and nervous diseases” (163) named Kreissler hears of his case, and intervenes, successfully banishing Vittoria’s ghost, and laying the foundation for Marlowe’s recovery. Kreissler stages a séance, using a brazier emitting camphor smoke to stimulate the ghost’s dissipation, manipulating Marlowe into believing his hallucination is fading. Yet the story’s ambiguity persists: is Vittoria truly haunting him, or is this a psychotic breakdown? The final lines leave the question unresolved, emphasizing the destructive power of psychological obsession. This, then, is a story in which the spirit is indeed a woman spurned in love; however, she is not the obsessive, spiteful and vindictive figure we might expect. She has died of pneumonia (166), not of a broken heart, and her “ghost” (Kreissler explains) is no more or less than the manifestation of her dying desire to see Marlowe again; “it has no volition, no power—but to materialize here, and it can be dispersed” (166). Therefore, this is not a story about a wronged woman, returning in death to haunt the man responsible. Nor is it a story in which Spiritualism, and spiritualist practices, are linked only to women. Most significantly this tale is about pathologized masculinity: Marlowe’s hysteria (expressed by palsied hands, night sweats, and insomnia) appropriates the somatic language typically applied to female patients in nineteenth-century medicine:

Marlowe […] began to laugh—the hard agonizing laughter of a strong man reduced by sheer suffering to hysteria (155); […] Marlowe was sleeping, but less quietly. His hands were thrown out over the sheet, and the fingers plucked nervously at the linen. His face looked ghastly; the skin was grey and drawn, and there were dark shadows around the sunken eyes.

(159)

These powerful depictions of psychological and physical torment illustrate Galbraith’s skilful use of Gothic conventions to explore an interior landscape of guilt and fear. The passages suggest that the true horror may not be the ghost of Vittoria Pandelli, but the spectre of Marlowe’s own actions, which are possessing his mind, and destroying his body from the inside out. This depiction follows the Victorian fascination with the connection between mental states and physical health, presenting a haunting that is as much about a pathology of the conscience as it is a supernatural event. This internalized haunting is further dramatized through the story’s medical figures, whose conflicting approaches reflect late-Victorian medicine’s fractured and uncertain response to psychic phenomena. The presence of three mental health specialists—Dr. Frank Kynaston, Dr. Forde, and Dr. Kreissler—exposes the instability of late-Victorian medical authority when confronted by the supernatural. Each represents a distinct methodological approach: Dr. Kynaston offers palliative care through sedatives like hyoscine, attempting to chemically suppress the symptoms of terror; Dr. Forde bases his diagnosis on psychosomatic problems, arguing that “there is no limit to the effect of mind upon matter” (161); and finally Dr. Kreissler, himself clairvoyant, who attempts to fuse “occultism with accredited medical science” (169), and treats the ghost as a phenomenon to be staged and dismantled. This unlikely combination lies at the heart of the tale’s unsettling power. By staging this confrontation between the supernatural and the clinical, Galbraith directly engages with contemporary medical and cultural debates concerning hallucination, insanity and the limits of perception. “The Ghost of Vittoria Pandelli” constructs a radical new materialist critique of Victorian medical epistemology through its destabilizing treatment of spectral agency, material entanglement, and the porous boundaries between psychological and supernatural phenomena. The story’s central tension—Christopher Marlowe’s haunting by Vittoria Pandelli—operates according to what Jane Bennett would term a vibrant “assemblage” (Bennett 2010, p. 45): a constellation of human and nonhuman actors (the ghost, medical instruments, domestic spaces, and chemical substances) that collectively undermine the physician’s presumed authority over matter and meaning. Vittoria’s manifestations—the “mysterious sounds”, “soft footfalls”, “faint rustling” (140), the moans heard by multiple witnesses—exceed conventional categories of hallucination or supernatural visitation. Instead, they exemplify Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action”, where phenomena emerge through the dynamic entanglement of material and discursive forces. The chaise longue where Marlowe kneels is more than a piece of furniture: it is an apparatus of haunting, its materiality intra-acting with Vittoria’s history of unrequited love and Marlowe’s scientific background to produce effects that are simultaneously psychological and physical. Even the brazier in Kreissler’s séance is not a passive prop but a “vibrant tool”. Its camphor smoke entangles with Marlowe’s psyche, materializing his fear as a manipulable spectacle. This story subverts Victorian gender dynamics: Marlowe, “bred in a school of scientific thought, which refuses credence to all that cannot be tested by the physical senses” (144), is now the hystericized subject, while Vittoria, a dismissed woman in life, wields power in death through her haunting presence.

Ultimately, Galbraith’s story anticipates twenty-first-century new materialist thought by exposing medicine’s reliance on material-performative rituals, and finally foregrounding affect as a trans-corporeal force that exceeds individual bodies. The tale’s unresolved ending—with Kreissler’s staged séance providing only temporary relief—suggests that in Galbraith’s universe, matter’s vibrancy will always exceed human attempts at its control, whether through clinical or occult means. This constitutes a radical epistemological challenge: if even ghosts participate in material assemblages that disrupt medical authority, then the foundations of Victorian science itself must be rethought6.

“The Ghost of Vittoria Pandelli” is a powerful story of how the spirit world can generate disruptive forces, and how those forces can disturb the living; in turn, we are asked to side with the psychical, and accept that these forces are real, and as such, subject to their own laws and rules, which may in turn be codified to form a new kind of medical practice. One might add that Galbraith’s tale therefore marks a break with earlier, Gothicized forms of ghost fiction, aligning her with (rather than against) the work of much better-known figures such as M. R. James, who was then revolutionizing supernatural fiction with stories of “subtlety, suggestion and psychological torment” (Gunn 2023, p. 182). As Galbraith’s penetrating grasp—and powerful depiction—of psychological disturbance suggests, she has here found a way of leaving behind the overworked and overused tropes of earlier Victorian ghost stories (Gunn 2023, p. 182), and inflecting the Gothic with a new subtlety that is no less powerful for being brought home to the real world of modern marriages and London life. Galbraith’s innovative treatment of supernatural phenomena in “The Ghost of Vittoria Pandelli”—where psychical forces resist materialist reductions—establishes the conceptual framework for her more radical integration of Spiritualism within the ghost story, as becomes clear in “In the Séance Room”.

4. “In the Séance Room” and the Feminist Counter-Laboratory

By positioning Galbraith within what Owen has termed the “darkened room” of women’s spiritualist practice, this analysis demonstrates how she transformed the séance from a site of medicalized pathology into a proto-feminist epistemological space—one that shows how “there is no limit to the effect of mind upon matter”, precisely because matter itself refuses the limits imposed by human systems of institutionalized scientism. In “In the Séance Room”, Galbraith illustrates this subversion through the downfall of Dr. Valentine Burke, a charming and manipulative physician who exploits hypnotism and psychology for personal gain. His name alone signals his duality: the romantic connotations of his first name clash grotesquely with the surname, evoking the body-snatchers Williams Burke and Hare who, in 1828, went on a murderous spree to supply corpses for anatomical research. Like them, Burke commodifies bodies, but he is searching for control, not cadavers. As a physician, Valentine has no interest in his patients, or in their welfare. He exemplifies the predatory masculinity recognized by Victorian medical and social structures, a man who views his profession merely as a means to prosperity and sexual conquest. Burke, it seems, has an interest in Spiritualism, and is himself a “strong magnetiser” (57), a reference to the contemporary fascination in “animal magnetism”, which we might now translate as hypnotism. Burke can, in other words, exercise mind control over others; and “[i]n that section of society which interests itself in occultism Burke saw his way to making a big success” (58)—and success means finding a rich wife. His courtship of the pretty, wealthy, independent, and “extremely susceptible” (58) Elma Lang is a calculated transaction disguised as romance, and so, by using his powers on her, they are engaged within the month. Burke’s psychological vampirism reaches its apex in the mesmeric murder of Kitty, his discarded lover, a woman whose “devotion nauseated him” (61). In a scene that exposes mesmerism as a tool of male authority, his “cold, steady, unflinching gaze” (63) overwhelms her, and Galbraith masterfully depicts the annihilation of her agency: “The light of consciousness had died out of the blue eyes, leaving them fixed and glassy” and “[m]echanically she obeyed him” (63). He orchestrates her death-by-drowning, and is subsequently applauded by the coroner for his “courageous attempt” (65) to save her. This public acclamation is Galbraith’s ultimate critique of a society so invested in patriarchal narratives—here of the heroic male rescuer—that it will actively reward the very violence that sustains it.

Yet, in the story’s new materialist logic, this perfect crime is inherently unstable. Burke’s triumph is immediately undermined by a vital, testifying object: during Kitty’s murder in the canal, Burke loses the expensive diamond engagement ring given him by Elma which represents the first instance of vibrant matter disrupting his narrative control. This token of betrothal (which itself symbolizes the cynical transactional nature of it) becomes a material witness to his violence, destined to intra-act within the matrix of the séance room—the very epistemological arena where Burke believes he is most in control, but where the agential matter he disregards will ultimately reconfigure his world and deliver its verdict.

Four years later, Burke’s seemingly perfect life collapses during a séance. His character embodies a telling contradiction: though a master of manipulative mesmerism, he dismisses the autonomous agency of mediumship, a skepticism that positions him as the head of an investigative committee against the celebrated medium Madame Delphine. The committee’s failure to expose fraud foreshadows the story’s climactic inversion where Spiritualism’s power lies not in resisting its own debunking, but in its capacity to reveal hidden truths. The séance thus turns into a supernatural courtroom, as Madame Delphine conjures Kitty—a revenant with a material life, appearing in “dark, clinging garments […] dripping with water” (70)—back into existence. Her accusatory presence, emitting a “deathly dampness” (71) leaves behind the final proof of her murder: the engagement ring. Confronted by Elma, Burke refuses to give her the truth, but his own methods are turned against him. Elma’s parting note reveals she used mesmerism to extract his confession, leading him to take his own life.

Elma’s use of Burke’s own mesmeric techniques recalls Alex Owen’s representation of spiritualist practices as “an infringement of the power politics implied by gender relations” (Owen 1989, p. 12), where women demonstrate their capacity to appropriate male knowledge systems. Elma’s final letter, with its visceral description of Burke’s unconscious confession, transforms the private feminine sphere of letter-writing into a courtroom where patriarchal crimes are tried and judged. This decisive act is fundamental for solving a crime, and for inverting the very dynamics of possession that have defined the narrative. In Burke’s case, one is tempted to say that he rejects what he himself cannot and does not possess. And possession is very much the point of this story: possession, and dispossession, but also liberation from possession. Kitty finds her freedom only in death, and through vengeance, yet free she is, fading from Burke’s view as she slips from his grasp. Elma, at least, is able to free herself of Burke, whom we might characterize as an incubus, and in so doing, precipitate Burke’s end. Thus, three narrative arcs are described in the story, and all turn on gendered oppositions, between male control and female empowerment; between masculinist possession (of self, of subjecthood, of knowledge) and female (if not feminist) freedom. The victims are victims no more.

As this brief outline suggests, Galbraith’s story is one of her most powerful, weaving together familiar Gothic tropes (such as Burke’s guilty secret) with spiritualist concerns, and blending the two in a powerful dramatization of the gendered dynamic at work in Victorian society; her portrayal of Burke’s pathological narcissism is itself highly compelling. To understand how Galbraith executes her critique, it is essential to take a closer look at the story’s most relevant scenes. On the one hand, therefore, Galbraith makes good use of the Gothic, most notably in her portrayal of Kitty’s return, the first time in life, the second time in death:

By the irregular flicker of the street-lamp he could make out the dark figure of a woman on the steps beneath, and through the patter of the falling rain he fancied he caught the sound of a suppressed sob. With a quick glance, to assure himself that no one was in sight, the doctor ran downstairs and opened the door. A swirl of rain blew into the lighted hall. The woman was leaning against one of the pillars apparently unconscious.

Burke touched her shoulder. “What are you doing here?” he asked sharply. At the sound of his voice she uttered a little cry and made a sudden step forward, stumbling over the threshold, and falling heavily against him.

“Val, Val,” she cried, despairingly, “I thought I should never find you. Take me home, take me home. I am so tired—and, oh, so frightened!”

The last word died away in a wailing sob, then her hands relaxed their clinging hold and dropped nervelessly at her side (Italics mine, pp. 60–61).

This passage functions as a concentrated Gothic tableau. Galbraith’s descriptions are mostly based on sensorial details: the auditory “patter of falling rain” merging with Kitty’s “suppressed sob” creates an unsettling harmony of natural and human distress while the physical “swirl of rain” invading Burke’s domestic space becomes a metaphor for the return of the repressed guilt. The description of Kitty’s movements, and her vocal dynamics, transform her into a living embodiment of Victorian femininity in distress: constrained, dependent and forced into a state of silent suffering. Meanwhile, Burke’s detachment reveals the cold mechanics of patriarchal power. This moment becomes symptomatic of their entire relationship: her nerveless hands slipping away prefigure both her literal death by drowning, and her subsequent spectral return, when she reclaims agency through supernatural means. This reclamation of agency culminates in the séance scene, where Galbraith provides Kitty with a truly chilling entrance that merges Gothic terror with devastating social critique. In the near darkness of that room, a “sudden silence had fallen on the audience” (70), the narrator tells us, and a “draught of icy air” (70) was sweeping through the séance chamber, showing a rupture in the rational order the test committee sought to impose. What follows is not the expected ethereal spirit, it a visceral, material apparition:

Suddenly the stillness was broken by a shriek of horror. It issued from the lips of the medium, who, like a second Witch of Endor, saw more than she expected, and crouched terror-stricken in the chair to which she was secured by cords adjusted by the test committee. The presence which had appeared before the black curtain was no white-clad denizen of “summer-land”, but a woman in dark, clinging garments—garments, to all appearance, dripping with water—a woman with wide-opened, glassy eyes, fixed in an unalterable stony stare. It was a ghastly sight. All the concentrated agony of a violent death was stamped on that awful face […].

(70)

Nearer and nearer “it” came. Now it was close to him. He could feel the deathly dampness of its breath; those awful eyes were looking into his. The distorted lips parted—formed a single word. Was it the voice of a guilty conscience, or did that word really ring through and through the room—“Murderer!”

(71)

With its description of the room’s deathly chill, and the medium’s witch-like shrieks, this scene has all the dramatic—the overwrought—intensity of the Gothic; it also has that horrific thing, the dehumanizing “it”, the monstrous other of Gothic fiction. And this Gothic form is palpably present, in a narrative that insists on its (Kitty’s) material being, from her sodden clothes to the damp breath against Burke’s cheek, the unmistakable evidence of drowning. The Gothic form is not merely spectral; it is painfully real. And this realism is historically grounded: death by drowning was an accepted, and often gendered, fact of Victorian life—and it was not always accidental. In the thick fogs that beset London in autumn and winter, many people fell into the Thames, out of reach of any rescuers. Many of the drownings were, however, deliberative. In a society that demanded its women behave as desexualized angels, any form of sexual impropriety was enough to ruin a reputation; every year, women committed suicide to avoid the shame, victimized by a double standard that tolerated the sexual adventures of predatory men, while condemning as ‘fallen’ their victims. Put somewhat differently, many women just like Kitty took their own lives, as the coroner and witness assume she has done. In spite—or rather, as part of the Gothic mode on which it draws, Galbraith’s story therefore turns on hard facts—and this brings us to the way in which she makes use of Spiritualism. The Gothic often gestures towards the supernatural, even if only, in the end, to rationalize it away; Galbraith recognizes in the rise of popular Spiritualism an opportunity to position the supernatural at the centre of her story, without further explanation, as itself a fact. Kitty as revenant is real, Galbraith can and does insist, and the (agential) reality of her being is underlined by the ring she leaves behind. “I believe in matter and myself” (67), Burke tells Elma when she asks him if he believes in anything; and that “small, glittering object” (70) is nothing if not real.

As this analysis has shown, “In the Séance Room” can be considered as a landmark in feminist Gothic literature, one that anticipates later theoretical concerns with materiality, embodiment and epistemic justice. By setting Galbraith’s narrative in dialogue with both its historical moment and contemporary critical frameworks, we can appreciate how Victorian women writers used spiritualist paradigms not for sensational effects, but to imagine alternative possibilities of truth-telling, directly challenging the medical, legal, and narrative conventions that had long silenced women’s experiences. The ending of the story transcends mere revenge, offering a critique of Victorian gender and class hierarchies. Burke’s suicide is no redemption, it is the final act of a narcissist, the inevitable end of a man who viewed women as instruments. By contrast, Elma’s escape, as well as Kitty’s posthumous vengeance, affirm the story’s radical thesis: that patriarchal violence, once exposed, may collapse under the weight of its contradictions. As already mentioned, this collapse is symbolic and materially enacted through the very objects that saturate the narrative. Galbraith’s “In the Séance Room” is a tale of manipulation, murder, and spectral vengeance, where objects—far from being passive elements—operate as agents of power and resistance that shape fate, expose truth, and ultimately dismantle patriarchal control. The story reveals how materiality—exemplified here by the diamond rings, letters, gazes, and even water—becomes a site of resistance against Dr. Burke’s tyranny. The ring, gifted by Elma Lang, symbolizes Burke’s exploitation of women’s affection and wealth, reducing Elma to a financial vehicle. Yet the ring’s materiality transcends its symbolic role. Lost during Kitty’s drowning, the ring physically links Burke’s two victims. Its disappearance into the canal mirrors Kitty’s erased body, but its spectral return in the séance (dripping with water) forces it into an evidentiary object that proves Dr. Burke’s guilt. Here the ring exemplifies Bennett’s idea of “the force of things” (Bennett 2010, p. 1), the “agentic capacity” (Bennett 2010, p. 9) that allows the object to become an actant or, more specifically here, a “legal actant”, fundamental to the unmasking of a criminal. In line with Bennett’s conceptualization of matter as able “to make things happen, to produce effects” (Bennett 2010, p. 5), objects can exert nonhuman agency to disrupt anthropocentric hierarchies. The lively materiality of the ring—its capacity to resurface, to reflect light, to accuse—challenges Burke’s authority and demands ethical accountability. Here Galbraith aligns feminist and new materialist critiques, demonstrating how oppression leaves material traces that can in turn act against perpetrators. The ring does not ‘represent’ justice; it enacts it through spiritualist practice and is therefore integral to Kitty’s vengeful haunting.

Water is another important material force in the story in its dual role as an agent of destruction and resurrection. This duality is established when Kitty’s letter resists burning because it is “damp with a woman’s tears” (60). Water here preserves truth, and directly undermines Burke’s attempt at destruction. Later, the canal where Kitty drowns becomes a liminal space where the past resurfaces. The “dripping garments” of her spirit literalize the return of the repressed. In this way, water is represented as a disruptive force that erodes patriarchal control, and ensures that Burke’s crime cannot remain hidden.

Even the hypnotic gaze is an example of the materiality of vision: Burke’s hypnotic power over women gives tangible form to the male gaze reducing Kitty and Elma to pliant bodies. Yet, in the séance, the dynamic is reversed: Burke’s gaze, a physical force, and a “steady, unflinching” look of domination is met by Kitty’s dead eyes, “glassy” and “fixed”, which reflect his crimes back on him. Their material properties (light and reflection) transform them into mirror of judgement. The séance scene stages a confrontation where the gaze, once a tool of control, becomes a medium for justice. Finally, the gun, the ultimate object of power, undermines Dr. Burke in its materiality. Having lost control over women, he is acted upon by the very instrument he wielded. Thus, “In the Séance Room” illustrates how objects, through their material persistence, collaborate with marginalized women to overthrow their oppressor. In a world where human justice fails, material forces remember. Kitty’s spirit is not alone in haunting; so do objects, becoming allies that help to ensure that even in death she is heard. This new materialist reading ultimately reveals the profound instability of the very categories—subject/object, real/imagined, psychological/supernatural—that Victorian medicine sought to master, highlighting the fact that Galbraith’s critique operates at the most fundamental, ontological level.

5. Conclusions: The Testifying Presence of the Material World

Lettice Galbraith’s two stories, as analyzed in this paper, represent a significant contribution to the intellectual debates of her era, challenging prevailing notions about science, gender, and knowledge. Galbraith’s stories speak directly to current interdisciplinary conversations in posthumanism, and new materialism, showing that the Victorian era was already deeply engaged with questions of agency, materiality, and the limits of human perception. Ultimately, Galbraith’s legacy is her demonstration that the struggle for epistemic justice often occurs outside formal institutions, in the darkened room, through the communal act of listening—through the whispers of the past, the testimony of objects, and the voices of the marginalized. By means of her unique synthesis of the Gothic, Spiritualism, and an incipient feminist materialism, she created a literary mode that challenged the epistemological authority of Victorian science and medicine. Her stories propose that the “effect of mind upon matter” is not a delusion to be pathologized, but a reality to be engaged with—one that opens new possibilities for truth-telling and justice. The séance significantly becomes a space of female empowerment, where women regain agency from male-dominated medicine and psychiatry, and where matter refuses “the limits imposed by institutionalized scientism” (Liggins 2022, p. 192). In “In the Séance Room”, mediums and ghosts wield knowledge that male professionals can neither access nor suppress, transforming spiritualist practice into a form of epistemological resistance. In a society that systematically silenced female voices, Spiritualism granted them—both as mediums and as “spirit” presences—a legitimate platform for public expression and authority, an authority that, in Galbraith’s stories, is substantiated and enacted by the lively materiality of the objects themselves. Galbraith moves beyond the supernatural as metaphor for social critique and begins to treat it as a methodology. In her hands, spiritualist practice becomes a way of knowing that privileges embodied experience, communal witness, and the testifying power of the material world over the cold, isolating rationality of institutional orthodoxy. The relevance of her work lies in this provocative claim: that systems of power which seek to silence and erase will inevitably be undone by the material world that remembers, accuses, and ultimately, speaks truth.