Mme. d'Esperance

Mme. d'Esperance (born Elizabeth Hope, 1855–1919) was a British spiritualist medium who, according to Nandor Fodor, exemplified "the quality evidence available through physical mediumship, but also, the problems that occurred in respect of female mediums in Victorian England".^[1][2]

Biography

Having spent rather troubled childhood full of weird visions, mother’s scolding and doctors’ harassment, Elizabeth discovered spiritualism and in the early 1870s experienced her first mediumistic powers, expressed first in table-tipping and automatic writing.^[1] According to many witnesses she also demonstrated abilities in clairvoyance. Elizabeth (who by this time married a Mr. Reid and was based in Newcastle) adopted the pseudonym "Mme. d'Esperance" and as such travelled through many European countries, giving performances in Denmark, France, Norway, Belgium, Sweden and Germany.^[2]

In Sweden Mme. d'Esperance produced her first materializations, her control Walter Stacey being the first one to appear - initially as a "smiling face", later in flesh. A couple of so much more spectacular spirit-guides arrived later: Yolande, a young Arab girl, and Nepenthes, an Egyptian beauty. It was the first of the two who demonstrated (according to some investigators, including William Oxley, Alexandr N. Aksakov, professors Butleroff and Fiedler) extraordinary abilities to produce flower apports, the most spectacular of them being a 7-foot-high (2.1 m) Golden Lily. This immense flower appeared during the seance on 28 June 1890, stayed in darkness for a week (due to medium’s alleged inability to produce enough energy for its dematerialization) and "vanished in an instant, filling the room with an overpowering perfume".^[1][3] It was Yolanda’s habit to wander freely among guests and flirt with men, though, that (according to Doctor Fodor again) gave Mme. d'Esperance some grave physical traumas, the worst of which (in 1883) caused the rupture of her lung due to the so-called "ectoplasmic impact".^[2]

The fact that Mme. d'Esperance’s female controls were looking strangely similar to herself made sceptics smell fraud. According to one of the believers, Alexander N. Aksakoff, though, what actually happened was dematerialization of the medium’s physical body and its total merging with the phantom’s one. This theory has been advanced in full detail in his book A Case of Partial Dematerialization, where he claimed to have "had an experience which strongly suggested that, in some cases at least, the body of the medium is entirely absorbed for the production of apparitions outside the cabinet".^[4] In March 1890 Mme. d'Esperance's materialized figures' first photographs were produced and later included in the book Mediums and Daybreak.^[2]

Later Mme. d'Esperance stopped using cabinets and allegedly proved her ability to demonstrate herself and her "phantoms" simultaneously. In 1897 she published the acclaimed book Shadow Land (or: Light from the Other Side, London, Redway, 1897) (with preface by Aksakoff again) in which she gave full account of her troubled life and highlighted the "outrages" to which young female mediums in Victorian England were subjected by middle-aged, middle-class male academics. "My blood boils within me when I hear of sensitive mediums... being subjected to the indignities and insults of these 'investigators'", she wrote.^[5]

At the outbreak of the First World War, Mme. d'Esperance found herself in Germany, where she was interned and searched. All of her papers collected for Shadow Land’s second volume were confiscated and never resurfaced again.^[2]

Her Last mediumistic seance was held on May 1, 1919, in (Østerbro) Copenhagen, Denmark. She died shortly after that, on July 20, 1919.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} The Mediumship of Mme. d’Esperance
2. ^ ^{a b c d e} ISS: Biography of Elizabeth d’Esperance
3. ^ N. Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science (London: Arthurs Press, 1933), p.84.
4. ^ Fodor, Op. Cit., p.85.
5. ^ d'Esperance, Op. Cit., pp.403-404.

Literature

• B. Inglis, Natural and Supernatural (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977)
• W. L. Curnow, The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism (Manchester: Two Worlds Publishing, 1925)
• S. Muldoon and H. Carrington, The Phenomena of Astral Projection (London: Rider and Co, 1951)
• A. Owen, The Darkened Room (London: Virago, 1989)
• H. Boddington, The University of Spiritualism (London: Spiritualist Press, 1947)
• H. E Bonne, Livet og åndeverdenen - Psykiske oplevelser gennem 25 år (Denmark (1. oplag 1924), (2. oplag 1983, Strubbes forlag))

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Date of birth	1855
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Date of death	1919
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