Open Secrets

Open Secrets sheds new light on the fascinating popular fiction produced by key writers within Britain's occult revival, including Edward Bulwer Lytton, Emma Hardinge Britten, Marie Corelli, Mabel Collins, Arthur Machen, Charles Fort, Aleister Crowley, and Dion Fortune. In their hands, genres aimed at mass readerships- the Bildungsroman, romance, tabloid tit-bit, and detective tale- became potent tools through which to imagine and test unorthodox ideas about the unseen world. Their remarkable literary experiments aligned the rhythms of popular genre fiction with those of spiritual seekership, insisting that occultism could and should be for the mass reading public.