The other side

It’s not so long ago that a woman’s expressed interest in other realms would have ruined her reputation, or even killed her. And yet spiritualism, in various incarnations, has influenced numerous men without repercussion. The fact that so many radical women artists of their generation – and earlier – also drank deeply from the same spiritual well has for too long been sorely neglected. In ‘The Other Side’, the author explores the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women, from the twelfth-century mystic, composer and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock.