Selene of the Spirits: A Love Story

Flannery O'Connor award-winner Pritchard mixes the academic's reserve with the artist's probing of character and the enthusiast's flights of fancy in this Victorian novel. Her research, as described in an afterward, combines all three with a generous dose of mystical coincidence. Inspired by the love affair between a married scientist and his subject, psychic Selene Cook, the story centers on Selene's awakening powers. Daughter of a vulgar, ambitious, humorless woman and a lazy, sadsack father, Selene hears voices, suffers trances and reads unhappy futures in the faces of strangers. The shape of her life is cast the day she loses her teaching position, consequently disrupting the education of her younger, plainer sister Octavia, whose heartfelt ambition focuses on intellectual recognition. Selene, too self absorbed to understand Octavia's deep resentment, follows her voices to a London spiritualist and finds solace in the structure and artifice of training to be a parlor medium. A success on the séance circuit, Selene attracts the attention of a "spiritualist investigator" who exposes her most spectacular "manifestation" as a fraud. With the loss of her reputation and patron, Selene implores a respectable scientist, William Herapath, to authenticate her powers. Herapath, captivated by Selene's more physical attributes but in financial thrall to his peculiar wife (who is caught up in the fad for taxidermy), conducts their love affair with a mixture of passion, venality and cowardice. It can only end badly, with Selene, pregnant and alone, exiled to rural Wales. Here she discovers a fleeting peace in the reawakening of her spiritual side, although unable to break the cycle of earthly tragedies and betrayals, culminating in the sad end revealed in the book's prologue. Pritchard's characters are vivid, their humanity timeless, their attitudes and actions shaped by the proprieties of their time. Her unobtrusive research (Victorian "scientific" methods, the occult, taxidermy) shows in the details. The writing is elegant, with touches of dry comedy. There is a feeling of distance, of biography, reinforced by the use of Selene's diary entries, letters and occult newspaper accounts. While this subverts suspense, it lends authenticity to the account and maintains its aura of mysticism. Thoughtful, well-written and entertaining.

Melissa Pritchard continues to amaze me with her beautiful use of the English language, enticing plot line, realistic characters, and beautiful poignancy. As with her former works, she captures the reader instantly, and will not let go, until long after you read the last page. Along with this bok, I strongly reccomend her novel entitled "Phoenix", a story of a girls youth on the road. Her books read like movie scripts, complete with complex characters and visual illustration that comes to life within her written words. I believe her to be one of the foremost authors in the world right now, and implore you to discover her fascinating world, that takes you all the way from the brightest light, to unimaginable darkness. Two thumbs up!