Alright team,

How are you all doing today? I hope that you and yours and everyone you love are well. I hope you are looking forward to the treats I have in store for you today.

I've been reading an absolutely belting book this week, it's called The Ghost: A Cultural History and it's by Susan Owens. It's one of those great non-fiction books that take an incredibly proscribed idea – in this case, the idea of the ghost in British culture – and then just dig right in so every page you read you think oh! right! of course!

If you are remotely spookily inclined it will be an absolute treasure trove of the things that have influenced you without your necessarily knowing about it, and if you are not spookily inclined it's a delightful sideways look at British thought and history and art.

Here's Susan Owens herself in an article that races through some of the ideas in her book:

I was intrigued to find the idea of the dead returning to their old homes so entrenched in the British imagination, and it made me reflect on the place ghosts have in our culture. We tend now to think of ghosts as personifications of our history. Was it always this way, I wondered – or have our perceptions of them changed over time? What I quickly discovered was that spirits were not always regarded as the insubstantial presences we think of today. Far from it. While nowadays a ghost might be expected to materialise, drift gently towards the door and disappear, in the 12th century it was more likely to break it down and beat you to death with the broken planks. Before the Reformation, some ghosts were thought to be refugees from Purgatory, slipping back – often in the guise of dogs or horses – to beg for prayers to shorten their suffering. Later, in the 17th century, they were devils pretending to be human spirits to trick us. Woodcut illustrations for popular ballads fixed a stock ‘ghost look’: shrouds tied up at the head, but undone at the feet – they had, of course, to walk. It was not until the late 18th century that ghosts would become transparent.

https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-41-autumn-2017/susan-owens-the-ghost

Of course another thing that I love about non fiction is that it's normally bursting to the seams with interesting women of whom I had never heard before. The Ghost was no different, and it introduced me to Georgiana Houghton, whose AbExey drawings from the Victorian Era were inspired by her experiences as a spiritualist. This one is called The Love of God:

Half a century before non-figurative art was popularised, Houghton’s drawings, in their psychedelic colours and passionate fluidity, in many ways,  anticipate the abstraction of early twentieth century art.

As Marco Pasi puts it:

Houghton transferred authorship and agency to the spirits. In doing so she could radicalise her artwork and make alien objects that could not be placed at the time in which they were made.

https://thecabinetofcuriosity.net/2016/04/28/georgiana-houghton/

Finally, if you just want to read a ghost story now, here's one by Violet Paget AKA Vernon Lee. One of the best sections in The Ghost was about women's frustrations in the Victorian Era just bursting out in the form of ghost stories. Snuggle up with 'The Phantom Lover' tonight, or maybe during an afternoon conference call you rebel:

MY DEAR BOUTOURLINE,

VERNON LEE

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8180

OooOOOooOOOooooOOOO,

Alex xx.

👻