Melanie R Anderson

From the celebrity spirit mediums of the nineteenth century to the TikTok witches hexing the patriarchy, women have long used magic and mysticism to seize back the power they re so often denied. Organized around different approaches women have taken to the occult over the decades creating new magical systems and symbols, using the supernatural for political gain, seeking fame and fortune as spiritual practitioners, questioning and investigating paranormal phenomena, and embracing their witchy identities this book shines a light on these under-appreciated magical pioneers, including: Dion Fortune, who tried to marshal a magical army against Hitler Tituba, the first woman in Salem accused of witchcraft Joan Quigley, personal psychic to Nancy Reagan Pamela Colman-Smith, the artist behind the Rider-Waite tarot deck Bri Luna, the Hoodwitch, social media star and serious magical practitioner Elvira, queer goth sex symbol who defied the Satanic Panic. And more mystical women from American history who found strength through the supernatural and those who are still forging the way today. Weird sisters are doin it for themselves!

Marjorie Bowen (1885-1952) was a prolific author of some 150 books and counted Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Graham Greene among her many admirers. Her most enduring work is her tales of the ghostly and supernatural, her favorites of which she collected in 1949 under the title The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories. Included in this volume are some of her most famous stories, including 'The Crown Derby Plate', a classic in which a woman gets more than she bargained for when she purchases a set of old plates at an estate sale, 'Kecksies', an unsettling tale in which it is unclear exactly who is dead and who is not, and the title story, 'The Bishop of Hell', which tells of a defrocked clergyman who promises to reveal the secrets of the afterlife from beyond the dead. This collection of twelve stories ranks among the finest volumes of British ghost stories of all time and is presented here with a new introduction by Melanie R. Anderson.

At first glance, Beloved would appear to be the only “ghost story” among Toni Morrison’s nine novels, but as this provocative new study shows, spectral presences and places abound in the celebrated author’s fiction. Melanie R. Anderson explores how Morrison uses spectres to bring the traumas of African American life to the forefront, highlighting histories and experiences, both cultural and personal, that society at large too frequently ignores. Working against the background of magical realism, while simultaneously expanding notions of the supernatural within American and African American writing, Morrison peoples her novels with what Anderson identifies as two distinctive types of ghosts: spectral figures and social ghosts. Deconstructing Western binaries, Morrison uses the spectral to indicate power through its transcendence of corporality, temporality and explication, and she employs the ghostly as a metaphor of erasure for living characters who are marginalised and haunt the edges of their communities. The interaction of these social ghosts with the spectral presences functions as a transformative healing process that draws the marginalised figure out of the shadows and creates links across ruptures between generations and between past and present, life and death. This book examines how these relationships become increasingly more prominent in the novelist’s canon—from their beginnings in The Bluest Eye and SulaBeloved, Jazz, and Paradise, and onward into A Mercy. An important contribution to the understanding of one of America’s premier fiction writers, Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison demonstrates how the Nobel laureate’s powerful and challenging works give presence to the invisible, voice to the previously silenced, and agency to the oppressed outsiders who are refused a space in which to narrate their stories.