A chance sighting of an advertisement for an engineering tutor with a military background leads JJ to Istanbul. Bored with working in London and trapped in a marriage that has grown stale, he s enticed by the promise of a career-changing opportunity. It isn't until some weeks later he learns that he had been the target of a well-laid trap, that changes not only his career, but turns his world upside down.

A highly original study that examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers, and believers during the golden age of spiritualism in the late Victorian era, The Darkened Room is more than a meditation on women mediums-it's an exploration of the era's gender relations.

The hugely popular spiritualist movement, which maintained that women were uniquely qualified to commune with spirits of the dead, offered female mediums a new independence, authority, and potential to undermine conventional class and gender relations in the home and in society.

Using previously...