Spectral Diarists: Sarah Waters’s Affinity and Melissa Pritchard’s Selene of the Spirits

Abstract

A neo-Victorian creative and critical desire to materialise Victorian ghosts finds affinity with epistolary strategies that mediate ideas of the occult within fiction. Writers repeatedly conjure the riddling world of nineteenth-century spiritualism with ‘authentic’ and ‘sincere’ diary voices that test the mysteries and contrived counterfeiting of mediumistic practices. Demonstrating an affinity between epistolary strategies and the keen neo-Victorian interest in spiritualism, popular novels like Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999) and the lesser-known Selene of the Spirits (1998) by Melissa Pritchard interpolate diary accounts as documented ‘evidence’ to either anchor or contest paranormal claims. In traditional narrative, expectations of diary sincerity may authorise veracity, but for revisionist texts the potential for unreliable diary writing proves a constructive concept to examine faith and doubt in spiritualist discourses.³ Drawing on H. Porter Abbott’s observation that it is a ‘mixture of sincerity and self-deception that governs [the diary] text’, this chapter investigates the different ways in which Waters and Pritchard manipulate epistolary expectations to creatively interrogate our critical vision of the Victorian occult.⁴

Good ghosts, speaking by book, make poor subjects, and it was clear that from the first my hovering prowling blighting presences, my pair of abnormal agents, would have to depart altogether from the rules.

Henry James Preface to The Turn of the Screw (1898)¹

At this place the entry in the Diary ceases to be legible. The two or three lines which follow, contain fragments of words only, mingled with blots and scratches of the pen.

Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (1860)²