Bio:Florence Marryat

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Florence Marryat was a believer in spiritualism, and wrote about this in both fiction and non-fiction works. We include here only her fiction works, but two books she wrote late in life, "There is No Death" and "The Spirit World" give accounts of séances she attended. Her primary medium for these seances was John William (J. W.) Fletcher. Fletcher and his wife, Susan Wills Fletcher, were accused of "unlawfully obtaining jewelry and other property of the value of £10,000 by false and fraudulent pretences". Specifically, the Fletchers convinced Mrs. Julia Theodora Hart-Davies that her deceased mother had told her to give those jewels to the Fletchers. While both husband and wife were charged, the law was unable to locate John (believing him to have fled to America), but Susan was convicted in 1881 and sentenced to a year at hard labor. When Susan was released, she reinvented herself as "Augusta W. Fletcher", and John & Augusta became trusted mediums for Marryat. In the case of "The Spirit World", Florence turned the copyright for her book over to the Fletchers, and Augusta is listed in the book as the copyright holder. (This may apply to some of her other books of this time.)

Sources: The Pall Mall Budget: Being a Weekly Collection of Articles Printed in the Pall Mall Gazette", Volume 26, April 1-Sept. 30, 1881, p. 30, "Haydn's Dictionary of Dates and Universal Information Relating to All Ages and Nations" 17th ed., 1884, p. 696, and "An Absolute Test: Charles Blackburn, Miss Cook, and the Fletchers.

WorldCat library record OCLC 39907215 reports for one 1883 publication, "by Florence Marryat (Mrs. Francis Lean)." The title page of that Tauchnitz Edition (Leipzig) does so identify her (t.p. dated 1883; viewed at HathiTrust where the original back cover, presumably, is dated July 1891). According to Wikipedia she and second husband Colonel Francis Lean were living together from the mid-1870s, married in 1879, divorced in 1880.