Seen and Unseen

What It's About

A memoir exploring psychic experiences, written in the early twentieth century. The author recounts her personal encounters with the supernatural, beginning with her childhood and continuing through travels in America, Australia, and New Zealand. Bates shares vivid narrative insights into her encounters with spirit communication, table-turning, and clairvoyance, presenting her reflections on the intricate relationships between life, death, and the unseen world.

Key Concepts

The book centres on the practices and language of Victorian and Edwardian spiritualism: table-turning sessions with friends, séances and encounters with mediums, and what Bates describes as her own developing clairvoyant faculties. Throughout, she weighs scepticism against personal conviction, treating these experiences as evidence of a permeable boundary between the living and the dead.

About the Author

E. Katherine Bates (1846–1922) was a British writer born in Dover, orphaned at the age of nine. An enthusiastic traveller, she journeyed widely across America, Australasia, and Asia, experiences that fed into both her travel writing and her later psychic memoirs. She became increasingly involved in the spiritualist movement from the 1880s onward and joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1891. She died in Bournemouth in 1922.