Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England

Acknowledgments

xvii Acknowledgments This book marks the end of a long process; to get to this point I have incurred many debts, personal and professional. For guidance, encouragement , and the occasional impossible challenge, my thanks are due to those who were my teachers and have become my friends: at the University of Sussex, to Eileen Yeo, who supervised the master’s thesis that sparked my interest in this area; at Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey, where I completed my Ph.D., to Michael Adas, John Gillis, Don Kelley, and Bonnie Smith. I am grateful to the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and especially to Phyllis Mack and the participants in the center’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” seminar in 1996–97, which provided an ideal setting in which to spend a year’s study leave and rethink the project. Above all, I am grateful to Judith R. Walkowitz, who supervised the Ph.D. dissertation that was the real beginning of this book and who did so much to shape my writing and my thinking, and to Leonore Davidoff who, since her term as a visiting professor at Rutgers, has been a continuing source of support and inspiration . At the University of British Columbia, I would like to thank my colleagues in the history department, especially Bill French and Jim Winter, and my colleagues in nineteenth-century studies, especially Pamela Dalziel and Maureen Ryan. For financial and institutional support, my thanks are due to the British Council, for a Commonwealth Scholarship that allowed me to begin my postgraduate work at the University of Sussex; to the organizers of the European Summer University (Berlin) in 1988, who allowed me to participate in their workshop on “Gender and History”; to Rutgers University; to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and to the University of British Columbia. I am also grateful to the staff, both in the history department and in the library, at Sussex, Rutgers, and UBC for their assistance over the years. For their kindness and generosity to an outsider, I would like to thank the staff and officers of the Theosophical Society in England, of the society’s Blavatsky Lodge, and of the library and archives at the xviii acknowledgments society’s international headquarters in Adyar, Chennai, India. Special thanks go to the Theosophical Society in England and to the Adyar Library and Research Centre, The Theosophical Society, Adyar, Chennai , 600 020, India, not only for allowing me access to their collections but also for permission to reprint unpublished material. Unfortunately, I was unable to get permission to reprint materials from the Blavatsky Lodge, but I am grateful to that organization for the opportunity to consult its collection. Thanks also to the Theosophical Publishing House for permission to reproduce an illustration. Unless otherwise noted, all information on membership in the Theosophical Society is taken from the membership registers, Office of the General Secretary, Theosophical Society in England. Thanks are also due to the Society for Psychical Research, whose archives were then located in London, both for granting permission to reprint materials and for making my research there a pleasure; and to the Hacker Papers, University College London Library. I am also grateful to the staff at the Johns Hopkins University Press, especially to Michael Lonegro and my editor, Henry Tom, for their support and assistance in the last stages of this project. Thanks also to Lys Ann Shore, whose highly professional work at the copy-editing stage made that part of the process as painless as possible. Portions of chapters 4 and 6 appeared in an earlier version in “Sexology and the Occult: Sexuality and Subjectivity in Theosophy’s New Age,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 3 (1997): 409–33 (䉷 1997 by The University of Chicago; now published by the University of Texas Press). A portion of chapter 8 appeared in “Ancient Wisdom, Modern Motherhood: Theosophy and the Colonial Syncretic,” in Gender , Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, ed. Antoinette Burton (London : Routledge, 1999). The effort to pursue historical work in this area has been made immeasurably easier thanks to the efforts of the journal Theosophical History , which, under the able direction of Leslie Price and James Santucci, has helped create a supportive environment for research and has also made available an enormous amount of invaluable primary and secondary material. I owe a special debt to Leslie Price, for his assistance over the years in locating key material and for his willingness to read...