‘The Dead Tell No Tales’: Female Agency in Spirit Photography and Victorian Ghost Fiction by Béatrice Chevrot

Spirit photography went from being, in its earliest stages, a powerful evidence of the tangible existence of spirits, to a compelling and emotional corpus that speaks to us today about love, grief, desire and loss in Victorian society. In the séance room, a short story by the mysterious writer Lettice Galbraith (1893) and two spirit photography plates issued by Georgiana Houghton in 1872 and published in her memoirs Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye (1882), are both vivid testaments of the fascination that the Victorians engaged towards spiritualism. The examination of these two artefacts, produced by women approximatively 10 years apart, as this essay argues, points to the central roles that women played in spiritualism and in ghost fiction, and unveil questions of power, agency, and negotiation of womanhood in the Victorian era within fictive and real worlds.