Chapter 7 interrogates the complex forms of spirit possession which emerged from the 1870s, as spiritualism moved away from incidences of materialization to delve instead into the inner workings of the psyche. In this context, this chapter demonstrates, music and literature were media not for self-expression but for accessing the transcendent. Accounts of mediumship from the spiritualist press, as well as the fictional musical medium in Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), demonstrate how the inner, spiritual ear was believed to pulsate in response to the flow of thoughts and impressions from the spiritual realm. This model of mediumship ultimately rejected any individual artistic agency by unequivocally locating the source of creative inspiration in the realm of the spirits, yet it still required intense physical labours and energy on the part of the medium to bring it to fruition in the material world.

Until the late twentieth century, literary scholars often assumed that Victorian scientific advances challenged the dominance of religion, theorizing that religious institutions and beliefs decline with modernity. More recently, scholars affiliated with the “religious turn” in Victorian studies have suggested Christian denominations gradually embraced scientific ideas, with new religious movements such as Spiritualism and Theosophy enabling Victorians to preserve elements of Christianity (e.g., belief in an afterlife) in a rapidly changing world. This chapter intervenes in these debates using two very different novels as case studies: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) and Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895), both of which freely mix Christianity with science: Wilde blends Catholicism, neuroscience, and aestheticism, while Corelli creatively revises scientific theories to align with her heterodox faith. With their occult and pseudoscientific leanings these works ask us to reconsider what counted as religion or science and to redraw the boundaries of faith to encompass unorthodox trends.

Marie Corelli wrote bestselling supernatural romances and detested the New Woman, while George Paston wrote realistic New Woman novels that cultivated a small, intellectual readership. Yet in the wake of the three-volume novel, both authors produced fiction about the writing life that makes the case for the codex book and the single-volume novel as bulwarks against the circular, self-contained system of other media—a system maintained by men. Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895) puts forward the bestselling novel as a means of direct, sanctified connection between celebrity author and adoring audience. Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898) looks to the future work, the novel unwritten, as a repository of truth and meaning. Together, they suggest that in the wake of the three-volume novel, the problem of the novel’s relationship to media systems could be approached as a problem of how and whether the novel mediates.