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236 letter 82 To Lilian Whiting November 18, [1901] New York City, New York 329 E 15 Nov 18 Dear Miss Whiting Reading lately that Mrs Piper had made a confession, that she did not now believe that she had communicated with spirits of the dead, it occurred to me to write you, if you knew and believed in her.1 Do you still have a relation with Kate Field,2 who was a woman as different to me as she was to you, that two personalities were made up between us.3 Sometimes I so long to touch Lorry’s beautiful hand, or lay mine on his head,4 that I would, like the wandering Jew,5 crawl to the edge of [Bering’s?] Straits,6 and stretch myself towards what I can never see. I have no belief nor unbelief— Mr Stoddard is heart broken. When he after clinging to hope, saw that he was dying, it was an awful blow that fell upon him, and from that hour to this he is not himself. At Liberty he wrote the beautiful poems in the Sat. Eve. Phil. Post. Yours truly Elizabeth Stoddard Manuscript: Lilian Whiting Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library notes 1. Leonora E. Piper (1859–1950) was a well-known American trance medium. After a number of sittings with the psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910), Piper was introduced to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), whom she allowed to study her for the next fifteen years. In 1901, she published “Mrs. Piper’s Plain Statement” in the New York Herald, announcing her separation 237 from the SPR, as well as her belief that spirits did not actually speak through her while in the trance state. While recognizing that “many bereaved people have been at least temporarily comforted in sorrow” from her work as a medium, she was inclined to see “the theory of telepathy...as the most plausible and genuinely scientific solution of the problem” (October 20, 1901). 2. See Letter 57, note 1. 3. Field, who had been an intimate friend of Whiting’s, died on May 19, 1896. In 1897, Whiting published After Her Death: The Story of a Summer, in which she claimed to have been communicating with Field since her death. While she did not mention Piper by name in After Her Death, Whiting later acknowledged that Piper was the medium through whom she contacted Fields’s spirit. See “From a Spirit,” Boston Globe (November 13, 1894): 4. 4. Lorimer Stoddard died on September 1, 1901, in Sag Harbor. 5. In medieval Christian folklore, the wandering Jew taunts Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and is then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. 6. Possibly a reference to The Wandering Jew (1845), a popular anti-Catholic novel by the French writer Eugène Sue (1804–1857). At the opening of the novel the wandering Jew and his sister, Herodiade, call out to each other across the Bering Strait. The two have been condemned to wander the earth until all of the members of a large family have died. ...

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