Patience Worth S Magazine

In June 1917, Henry Holt and Company published a book over 600 pages long entitled: "The Sorry Tale: A Story of the Time of Christ." Critics hailed it as a literary masterpiece. What makes it more amazing is this book was dictated a letter at a time by Patience Worth, a disembodied spirit, through the mediumship of Pearl Curran. "The Sorry Tale" contains an elegant and exquisite depiction of the gospel of Jesus Christ that has been extracted and presented here in this book, "The Gospel of Jesus Christus According to Patience Worth." This gospel provides novel insights into the life and lessons of Jesus. It reads like an eyewitness account and includes many fascinating intimate details. This unique document is for open-minded individuals who can recognize the Word of God, regardless of the channel through which it flows. In each generation, God provides us with an opportunity to cast off the past and hear His Word anew. This gospel is just such an opportunity.

Vol. for 1958 includes "Anthology of poems from the seventeen previously published Braithwaite anthologies."

The story of the invisible author who came to Mrs. John H. Curran and a friend in the summer of 1913 as they sat with a Ouija board across their knees. "Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth is my name." from that time forward a continuo.

When St. Louis homemaker Pearl Curran began writing fiction and poetry at a Ouija board in 1913, she attributed the work to the “discarnate entity” Patience Worth, a seventeenth-century Puritan. Though now virtually forgotten, her writing garnered both critical praise and public popularity at the time. The Patience of Pearl uncovers more of Curran’s (and thus Patience Worth’s) biography than has been known before; Daniel B. Shea provides close readings of the Patience-dictated writings and explores the historical and local context, applying current cognitive and neuro-psychology research. Though Pearl Curran had only a ninth-grade education, Patience Worth was able to dictate a biblical novel and a Victorian novel. Echoes of Dickens and the Potters, a circle of St. Louis women writers, make clear that Patience Worth reflects literary debts that go as far back as Curran being read to as a child. Shea argues that the workings of implicit memory suggest the medium’s creative achievements were her own body’s property. Curran also had musical training, and recent developments in the field of psychology regarding the overlap between musical and linguistic rhythms of regularity, anticipation, and surprise supply a firm foundation for attributing skills both automatic and creative to Curran. Her reflections on her doubleness in her self-study anticipate the many-personed Ouija board writing of poet James Merrill. Shea approaches Curran/Worth as a summary figure for the Victorian-era woman writer’s buried voice at the point of its transition into modernism. He investigates many lingering questions about Curran’s fluent productivity at the Ouija board, including the “smart” versus “dumb” unconscious. Shea links unconscious memory, dissociation, and automatic writing and reconsiders problematic assumptions about individual identity and claims of personal agency. The Curran/Worth Puritan/writer figure also allows scrutiny of gendered assumptions about the dangers of female speech and the idealization of women’s passive reception of divine, or husbandly, revelation. Novelistic in its own way, Curran’s life included three husbands and a child adopted on command from Patience Worth. Pearl Curran enjoyed a brief period of celebrity in Los Angeles before her death in 1937. The Patience of Pearl once again brings her the attention she deserves—for her life, her writing, and her place in women’s literary history.

The women referred to are Mrs. John H. Curran, wife of the former Immigration Commissioner of Missouri, and Mrs. Emily Grant Hutchings, wife of the Secretary of the Tower Grove Park Board in St. Louis, both ladies of culture and refinement. Mrs. Curran is a young woman of nervous temperament, bright, vivacious, ready of speech. She has a taste for literature, but is not a writer, and has never attempted to write anything more ambitious than a personal letter. Mrs. Hutchings, on the other hand, is a professional writer of skill, and it was to her quick appreciation of the quality of the communications that the starting of the record is due. It was soon apparent, however, that it was Mrs. Curran who was the sole agent of transmission; for the communications came only when she was at the board, and it mattered not who else sat with her. During the first months only Mrs. Curran and Mrs. Hutchings sat, but gradually the circle widened, and others assisted Mrs. Curran. Sometimes as many as five or six would sit with her in the course of an evening. Mr. Curran has acted as amanuensis, and recorded the communications at most of the sittings, Mrs. Curran’s mother, Mrs. Mary E. Pollard, occasionally taking his place. The ouija board is a rectangular piece of wood about 16 inches wide by 24 inches in length and half an inch thick. Upon it the letters of the alphabet are arranged in two concentric arcs, with the ten numerals below, and the words “Yes” and “No” at the upper corners. The planchette, or pointer, is a thin, heart-shaped piece of wood provided with three legs, upon which it moves about upon the board, its point indicating the letters of the words it is spelling. Two persons are necessary for its operation. They place the tips of their fingers lightly upon the pointer and wait. Perhaps it moves; perhaps it does not. Sometimes it moves aimlessly about the board, spelling nothing; sometimes it spells words, but is unable to form a sentence; but often it responds readily enough to the impulses which control it, and even answers questions intelligibly, occasionally in a way that excites the wonder and even the awe of those about it. Its powers have been attributed by some to supernatural influence, by others to subconsciousness, but science has looked upon it with disdain, as, until recent years, science has looked upon nearly all unprecedented phenomena. Mr. W. T. Carrington, an eminent English investigator of psychical phenomena, in an exhaustive work upon the subject, has this to say of the ouija board: “Granting for the sake of argument that the board is moved by the sitter, either consciously or unconsciously, the great and vital question still remains: What is the intelligence behind the board, that directs the phenomena? Whoever sets out to give a final and decisive answer to this question in the present state of our knowledge will have his task cut out for him, and I wish him happiness in the undertaking. Personally I am attempting nothing of the kind.”

When St. Louis homemaker Pearl Curran began writing fiction and poetry at a Ouija board in 1913, she attributed the work to the “discarnate entity” Patience Worth, a seventeenth-century Puritan. Though now virtually forgotten, her writing garnered both critical praise and public popularity at the time. The Patience of Pearl uncovers more of Curran’s (and thus Patience Worth’s) biography than has been known before; Daniel B. Shea provides close readings of the Patience-dictated writings and explores the historical and local context, applying current cognitive and neuro-psychology research. Though Pearl Curran had only a ninth-grade education, Patience Worth was able to dictate a biblical novel and a Victorian novel. Echoes of Dickens and the Potters, a circle of St. Louis women writers, make clear that Patience Worth reflects literary debts that go as far back as Curran being read to as a child. Shea argues that the workings of implicit memory suggest the medium’s creative achievements were her own body’s property. Curran also had musical training, and recent developments in the field of psychology regarding the overlap between musical and linguistic rhythms of regularity, anticipation, and surprise supply a firm foundation for attributing skills both automatic and creative to Curran. Her reflections on her doubleness in her self-study anticipate the many-personed Ouija board writing of poet James Merrill. Shea approaches Curran/Worth as a summary figure for the Victorian-era woman writer’s buried voice at the point of its transition into modernism. He investigates many lingering questions about Curran’s fluent productivity at the Ouija board, including the “smart” versus “dumb” unconscious. Shea links unconscious memory, dissociation, and automatic writing and reconsiders problematic assumptions about individual identity and claims of personal agency. The Curran/Worth Puritan/writer figure also allows scrutiny of gendered assumptions about the dangers of female speech and the idealization of women’s passive reception of divine, or husbandly, revelation. Novelistic in its own way, Curran’s life included three husbands and a child adopted on command from Patience Worth. Pearl Curran enjoyed a brief period of celebrity in Los Angeles before her death in 1937. The Patience of Pearl once again brings her the attention she deserves—for her life, her writing, and her place in women’s literary history.