£300
FIRST EDITION, 8vo, pp. 191. Original brown cloth, front board and spine lettered and bordered in black. Toned to endpapers. Spine ends bumped. Ink ownership inscription of William P. Finlay to front flyleaf, publisher’s presentation stamp to title-page.
The scarce first book by Margaret Varnum Underhill (c.1885-1953), an American violin teacher turned psychic medium after a finger injury ended her musical career. An account of 'automatic writing' which Underhill received as communication from 'the Great Beyond', the book follows in the footsteps of Yeats and Conan Doyle, who had explored similar phenomena in the previous decade, and immediately precedes the adoption of the technique by the surrealists in the 1930s. Underhill's source in the Great Beyond was William James, professor of at Harvard and the first to offer a course on psychology in the United States, who had died in 1910.
After this title, she wrote 'Your Latent Powers' and co-wrote 'The Psychic Faculties and Their Development' with spiritualist Helen MacGregor, both instructional guides to engaging in spiritualist practices. She also published 'Dreams of Udar' in the 1930s, a collection of verse she received from 'a Fellowship of wise and beautiful souls in the Great Beyond'. Her work received appreciative notices in the psychic and spiritualist press at the time but were not reprinted and are now scarce in institutions and particularly rare in commerce.
