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| CAPTIVITY, RELEASED JUNE 1, 2010 |
This masterful historical novel by Deborah Noyes, the lauded author of Angel & Apostle, The Ghosts of Kerfol, and Encyclopedia of the End (starred PW) is two stories: The first centers upon the strange, true tale of the Fox Sisters, the enigmatic family of young women who, in upstate New York in 1848, proclaimed that they could converse with the dead. Doing so, they unwittingly (but artfully) gave birth to a religious movement that touched two continents: the American Spiritualists. Their followers included the famous and the rich, and their effect on American spirituality lasted a full generation. Still, there are echoes. The Fox Sisters is a story of ambition and playfulness, of illusion and fear, of indulgence, guilt and finally self-destruction. The second story in Captivity is about loss and grief. It is the evocative tale of the bright promise that the Fox Sisters offer up to the skeptical Clara Gill, a reclusive woman of a certain age who long ago isolated herself with her paintings, following the scandalous loss of her beautiful young lover in London. Lyrical and authentic and more than a bit shadowy Captivity is, finally, a tale about physical desire and the hope that even the thinnest faith can offer up to a darkening heart.From the author:
Unpuzzling Maggie Fox: Spirit Photographs, Canal Packets, and a Town that Talks to the Dead
As soon as I read about them, I was drawn to the real-life rags-to-riches story of the Fox sisters. Two ordinary farm girls from Western New York, Maggie and Kate Fox gripped their community by claiming to be able to communicate with the dead. They became celebrities in the bargain, sowing the seeds of an international religious movement that would eventually claim a million followers.
I'm not sure why Maggie stood out for me. There were three Fox sisters, after all (older sister Leah assumed the role of manager), each with her own vivid traits. Any one of them would have made a great protagonist. But there was something about Maggie's expression in the handful of famous archival images that populate her biographies: a dreamy, withholding quality. Unlike forceful Leah or otherworldly Kate, Maggie seemed at once guileless and childlike, secretive and knowing, intent and sad. She was, she looked, a contradiction, and I found I had to unpuzzle her.
I'm a photographer, too, so images often point me to or nourish a story. I've always been intrigued by the historical phenomenon of spirit photography, and the year I started mulling Maggie, I happened across a very cool exhibit at the Met called "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," which kept her and her family in my thoughts.
But it was a few months later, when I visited Lily Dale for a nonfiction book I was also researching, that Captivity really began to take shape.
Founded more than 120 years ago, Lily Dale is a quaint Victorian hamlet on a lake in Western New York. One of the first area communities to score electricity, it was nicknamed "The City of Light," but it's best known today as "the town that talks to the dead." Every year, thousands of guests crowd through its gates to sit with resident mediums. In the busy summer season, there are dozens on hand, and each has passed a rigorous test before hanging out her or his shingle.
In the lobby of the Maplewood hotel, tourists testify over morning coffee, trade tales of spirits and furniture on the move, of knocks and noises in the night. They collect out by "the stump" at the Forest Temple, where mediums spot eager visitors from the Beyond and "serve spirit" by delivering messages to loved ones in the audience.
Lily Dale boasts a long, colorful history. Movie star Mae West was a regular, and Houdini came in disguise to expose deception. Suffragette Susan B. Anthony stopped in now and then — though she wasn't a spiritualist herself — and when a medium relayed a message from her aunt, fired back (in legend anyway) with, "I didn't like her when she was alive, and I don't want to hear from her now."
Early spiritualists were advocates of progressive political causes, but today Lily Dale leans more toward sweat lodge ceremonies, New Age workshops such as "Dreams and Astral Travel," and other recreational fare.
This fascinating slice of Americana can be traced, at least peripherally, back to Maggie and her family. My visit to Lily Dale helped me understand her playful side, her sense of showmanship — though other aspects of Maggie's character wouldn't reveal themselves until I enlisted the book's second protagonist, the skeptical Clara Gill, as foil.
While drafting the book, I did a couple of stints at the Gell Center of the Finger Lakes, an intimate writer's retreat in a remote mountain valley. I live in a city now, and sadly, silence is far from my daily experience; so the utter quiet and isolation at the retreat really fed whatever haunted fantasies I came in with! The first night or so, I was scared out of my wits, almost too spooked to write. But you have no business being complacent when you're writing about the dead as much as the living, so I'm sure my unease served the story. Long walks by day among tangled wild grapes — glimpses of deer and foxes — gave me insight into the wild world Maggie would have taken for granted and that Clara, a naturalist, immigrant, and artist, so much valued.
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| Marker in memory of the Fox sisters, Hydesville, NY |
Deb's website: http://www.deborahnoyes.com/
Thanks to Deborah for this guest post, and for the opportunity for my readers in USA and Canada to win a copy of her novel, CAPTIVITY..
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Ends July 25th.
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