The Case of Patience Worth

In lovely shape: unmarked, clean, no shelf-wear besides bumped corners at the foot. Includes price-clipped Mylar-protected jacket with light sunning to the spine. In his intro to this fascinating mediumship study, John C. Wilson writes, 'Confronted by a semi-literate housewife spouting forth a series of astonishing works of literature dictated to her by a seventeenth-century spirit, the American public first gapes and gawks and then wipes the whole thing out of its mind.' That 'semi-literate housewife' was Pearl Curran, who in 1912, while experimenting with a ouija board, began a decades-long series of communications with a spirit named Patience Worth, who claimed to have lived from 1649 to 1694 ('Good friends, let us be merrie,' she greeted Curran. 'The time for work is past. Let the tabby drowse and blink her wisdom to the firelog'). Curran and Patience Worth would go on to collaborate on a variety of novels, short stories, and poems, many of which saw great commercial and critical success. This study, undertaken at the height of the spiritualist revival, is here handsomely reprinted from the 1927 original, with matte jacket, goldenrod end-sheets, and a frontispiece depicting a distant-eyed Curran. 509 pp.