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But you, my dear, can you not read my thoughts at all?...
I have so strange a feeling that you could…if you would….
– Rebecca West, Harriet Hume
Set in the period shortly after World War I, Rebecca West’s obscure, outof-print novel Harriet Hume (1929) shows the correspondences between high modernism and the spiritual knowledges supposedly dispelled by discourses of Enlightenment modernity. Subtitled “A London Fantasy,” West’s saga tilts away from the generic markers of realism to a landscape of fantasy, rendered through the mannered remoteness and baroque aestheticism of its style. Such oscillations between realism and fantasy, the mundane and the mystical, historical specificity and a remote timelessness, register the power of West’s vertiginous aesthetic to mediate between an ironic portrait of the present and an invocation of other worlds and otherworldly experience. In Harriet Hume, the otherworldly is accessed primarily via the figure of telepathy, which enables the protagonist, Harriet Hume, to bring her mind closer to that of her lover, Arnold Condorex. Telepathy not only mediates the relationship between these figures—revealing their inevitable entanglement—but offers an analogue to West’s modernist practice, as a device for illuminating the fluid, intersubjective nature of consciousness. Inviting comparison to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), West’s Harriet Hume adapts the language of modern spiritualism to an investigation of consciousness, whereby characters otherwise distanced by social, political, and economic circumstances are linked through occult relation.
This essay focuses on the channels of telepathic transmission and reception that crisscross West’s experimental novel. West’s interest in telepathy, as a phenomenon that affirms the permeability of psychic boundaries and the entangled nature of consciousness, not only illustrates the persistence of spiritualism within the cultural imaginary of modernism but also the affinities between these spiritual knowledges and modernist literary form. As Helen Sword argues in Ghostwriting Modernism (2002), even the most rationalistic and skeptical of modernist authors were fascinated by popular spiritual phenomena in its full range of expression and assimilated into their art references to and representations of telepathy, mesmerism, hypnosis, séances, spiritual mediumship, and automatic writing.1 Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers including Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, May Sinclair, W. B. Yeats, H. D., Radcliffe Hall, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot became...