It is not so much that so many poltergeist girls have been housemaids and “adopted daughters”, as that so many of them have been not in their own homes; lost and helpless youngsters, under hard taskmasters, in strange surroundings —
This quotation from Charles Fort may help to explain why a sensitive, studious young girl, uprooted from a loving home at the age of thirteen, and made to work long hours in the fields in all kinds of weather, might develop a wild talent.
On the farms of the Scottish Borders in the 19th century, field workers were mostly women and young girls. Hired or “bonded” at hiring fairs along with a male relative, they were known as bondagers, and they did every kind of heavy outdoor work except for ploughing.
In her London journal of 1888 Alexandra David mentions that she has engaged a young girl to help her practise speaking English. Though Alexandra says nothing further about this anonymous jeune fille, I have given her a name — Jeannie Guthrie — a history, and her own strange story to tell.
Many of Alexandra’s early adventures in search of the Inconnu are recorded in journal entries published posthumously by Librairie Plon as Le sortilège du mystère. She has written in detail of her friendship with the artist Jacques Villemain, and of his mysterious painting. As well, she describes the experience of an unnamed woman (quite probably Alexandra herself) who made a spirit journey to the astral plane, while connected to her physical body by a thin hazy cord. However, my imagined country of the Beyond springs not from Alexandra’s writings, but from the visionary worlds of Symbolist artists.
In 1888 and 1889, Madame Helena Blavatsky, head of the British Theosophist movement, known to her friends and many admirers as HPB, was living in London’s Holland Park. Fashionable and artistic London flocked to her Saturday afternoon salons. Alexandra’s journal doesn’t mention a visit to 17 Lansdowne Road, but given her fascination with the occult, we can be fairly certain that she was familiar with Madame Blavatsky’s eccentric household.
I’ve been as faithful as possible to the recorded details of Alexandra’s life in the years 1888-1889; as well as to the London career of Madame Blavatsky. For daily life at 17 Lansdowne Road I’m especially indebted to Reminiscences of H.P. Blavatsky and The Secret Doctrine, by Constance Wachtmeister et al (Theosophical Publishing House). However, the part that my fictional heroine Jeannie Guthrie might have played in their lives is pure invention
Soon after this story ends, Alexandra journeyed to India and Ceylon. When she returned to Paris, she became an opera singer, married, and then, with the financial help of her loyal and long-suffering husband, abandoned everything to become an explorer and a student of Buddhist mysticism. In the course of a very long and adventurous life, she travelled to the forbidden city of Lhasa, lived for two years as a hermit in a Himalayan cave, and wrote more than thirty books on Eastern religion and travel.
If you’d like to learn more:
Charles Fort, Wild Talents (Ace Books, 1932; reprinted in Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, 1975)
Barbara & Michael Foster, Forbidden Journey — The Life of Alexandra David-Neel (Harper & Row, 1987)
Philippe Jullian, Dreamers of Decadence (Praeger, 1971)
Ian MacDougall, Bondagers: Eight Scots Women Farm Workers (Tuckwell Press, 2000)
Marion Meade, Madame Blavatsky, The Woman Behind the Myth (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980)
Alexandra David-Néel, My Journey to Lhasa (Beacon Press, 1983)