patience
Long time, no updates. My apologies, but since OSR, nothing much has been happening. I did get my computer back up and running, but now the stars are out of line and I simply haven't had a moment to process the audio we got from OSR. Also, there are no updates from Tim on any progress toward a GhostBox (etc). I have a feeling this is how the project will go at first, though: In fits and bursts -- at least until we have a good reason to devote more consistent time to it. In the meantime, the project requires a little patience. (Which was really just a weak way of leading up to this segue:) And speaking of patience ...
On July 8, 1913 St. Louis housewife Pearl Lenore Curran received an odd message while playing with a Ouija board: "Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name. If thou shalt live, so shall I." This message would begin a 25 year relationship with the spirit, during which time "Patience Worth" dictated a vast amount of literary work to Curran, including six novels, hundreds of pages of poetry, proverbs, and prayers. Many of the works were published under the name Patience Worth, including the novels The Sorry Tale, Telka (an "idyll of Medieval England"), and Hope Trueblood.
The method of dictation used by Curran was automatic writing: The modest middle-class housewife would sit in a brightly-lit room and wait for the sentences to form in her mind, then write or type them out. The only problem Curran experienced was that the messages were received in a dialect which was often difficult for her to understand -- because Patience Worth had been a young girl who had lived on a farm in the county of Dorset (on the south coast of England) in the 1600s. The Worths had later emigrated to America, where the whole family was murdered in a frontier skirmish. And by all accounts the character and temperament of Patience Worth -- with her biting, satirical wit -- was quite different from that of the "academically below average" Curran.
Many critics, including those from The New York Times and The Bookman, praised the literature of Patience Worth, citing the beauty of some of her imagery and her use of archaic words in her descriptions of objects that had been out of use for hundreds of years. The faithful wondered how a simple St. Louis housewife had acquired such precise historical details and such sophisticated literary skill.
Skeptics, however, noted that the appearance of Patience Worth coincided with a revival of Spiritualism in Europe and America, creating an environment where much of the public were only too willing to believe in the reality of the channeled ghost of a 17th century English girl. Indeed, they pointed out that, while Curran's use of 17th century dialects was compelling, the fact that one of the Patience Worth novels (Hope Trueblood) was set in Victorian England -- a full 200 years after Patience supposedly died -- proved that the whole story was little more than another fiction perpetuated by the admittedly talented Curran to help her sell books.
On July 8, 1913 St. Louis housewife Pearl Lenore Curran received an odd message while playing with a Ouija board: "Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name. If thou shalt live, so shall I." This message would begin a 25 year relationship with the spirit, during which time "Patience Worth" dictated a vast amount of literary work to Curran, including six novels, hundreds of pages of poetry, proverbs, and prayers. Many of the works were published under the name Patience Worth, including the novels The Sorry Tale, Telka (an "idyll of Medieval England"), and Hope Trueblood.
The method of dictation used by Curran was automatic writing: The modest middle-class housewife would sit in a brightly-lit room and wait for the sentences to form in her mind, then write or type them out. The only problem Curran experienced was that the messages were received in a dialect which was often difficult for her to understand -- because Patience Worth had been a young girl who had lived on a farm in the county of Dorset (on the south coast of England) in the 1600s. The Worths had later emigrated to America, where the whole family was murdered in a frontier skirmish. And by all accounts the character and temperament of Patience Worth -- with her biting, satirical wit -- was quite different from that of the "academically below average" Curran.
Many critics, including those from The New York Times and The Bookman, praised the literature of Patience Worth, citing the beauty of some of her imagery and her use of archaic words in her descriptions of objects that had been out of use for hundreds of years. The faithful wondered how a simple St. Louis housewife had acquired such precise historical details and such sophisticated literary skill.
Skeptics, however, noted that the appearance of Patience Worth coincided with a revival of Spiritualism in Europe and America, creating an environment where much of the public were only too willing to believe in the reality of the channeled ghost of a 17th century English girl. Indeed, they pointed out that, while Curran's use of 17th century dialects was compelling, the fact that one of the Patience Worth novels (Hope Trueblood) was set in Victorian England -- a full 200 years after Patience supposedly died -- proved that the whole story was little more than another fiction perpetuated by the admittedly talented Curran to help her sell books.
- further information:
- Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery by Casper Yost (1916)
- Pateince Worth at mysteriouspeople.com
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