Eileen Garrett spent a life trying to understand her life.
This book is her third attempt at autobiography, coming out three decades after her first. She was born in Ireland and grew up to be one of the most famous mediums of the 20th century--though she's mostly forgotten these days.
This book is not as weird as her second one, which makes it less interesting, too. Her childhood becomes more conventional--the classic red-headed step-child, abused for her lack of faith. At the same time, Ireland i
Eileen Garrett spent a life trying to understand her life.
This book is her third attempt at autobiography, coming out three decades after her first. She was born in Ireland and grew up to be one of the most famous mediums of the 20th century--though she's mostly forgotten these days.
This book is not as weird as her second one, which makes it less interesting, too. Her childhood becomes more conventional--the classic red-headed step-child, abused for her lack of faith. At the same time, Ireland itself takes on a more important role--as a place where belief in the supernatural was common and death an accepted part of life. These don't seem particularly unique, but Garrett casts them as so.
She was always sensitive to the emotions of other people--though in this iteration of her autobiography she's less empathetic to her family and peers as a youth--as well as to the magnetic fields she saw surrounding every living thing.
Garrett married and suffered unimaginable loss--three of her children died very young--as well as a loveless relationship. She divorced, married again--a boy who died in the Great War. She worked operated a hostel. And became involved with socialist policies in London--where a series of men interpreted hr sensitivities as parapsychological. Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, she transformed herself into a medium, working with the likes of Nandor Fodor, Harry Price, Hereward Carrington, and J.B. Rhine. Early in the 1930s she came to the United States, where she traveled and became involved with the American parapsychological community.
Garrett was sickly all her life--she wore a belt of rats that she fed everything she ate, to monitor her allergies. (She says this in a toss-away line: in her earlier book, the belt would have received significant discussion: weird.) And in the late 1930s went to southern France, in part for health reasons. She became ill, though. She fell in love with southern France--eventually purchasing land there--and stayed even as war came to Europe, helping the resistance and orphaned children. Finally, though, she realized as an Irish woman she was at extreme risk, and so returned to the U.S. Eventually she became an American citizen.
Returned to the U.S., she was done with the parapsychological for a time. She had been unimpressed by all those who had studied her before. She was not sure that she was in contact with the dead, or acting as a medium to a discarnate personality--as the lingo went. Instead, she thought she was just tapping into her subconscious. She thought those who had studied her were not sufficiently scientific, but moved by their own biases.
So she became involved with the literary world. Garrett had known a number of people involved with the Irish literary Renaissance--Joyce, Yeats, others--and remained intrigued by modernist literature. She started a literary journal, Tomorrow, and also a publishing house, Creative Age Press. She continued with these until 1951, when she sold her Press, re-launched her magazine as a parapsychological periodical, and re-started scientific investigation of her gifts. She spent the rest of her life on these pursuits, traveling a lot. Somehow, she had become wealthy, although exactly how is unclear.
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