Poetry, journalism and occult friendships
Born in Leicester, Vermont, in 1869, Barker worked as a teacher and journalist before developing a wider literary career. She contributed to periodicals and worked on Hampton’s Magazine. Her books included the novel The Son of Mary Bethel and the poetry collections The Frozen Grail and The Book of Love.
She lived in Paris and London during the early 1910s, participating in occult circles associated with the Theosophical Society and MacGregor Mathers’s Alpha et Omega. Her surviving letters to the artist W. T. Horton offer a more personal record of those connections. The Living Dead Man books appeared in 1914, 1915 and 1919. She continued writing in other genres, including mystery fiction, and died in 1954.
The writer’s account of the letters
The held Dutton reissue of 1920 of Letters from a Living Dead Man presents the text as written down by Barker. In her introduction, dated London 1913, she describes an impulse to write in Paris and messages signed X. She says she learned afterwards that the man she believed responsible had died in America. The communicator was subsequently identified as David Patterson Hatch, a lawyer and philosophical writer.
Barker reports writing in a partly conscious state, then editing repetitions and withholding private material. She acknowledges that the messages were not produced under scientific test conditions, while affirming her own belief in their origin. Their subjects include a changing afterlife, spiritual discipline and the relationship between thought and experience. Her account is therefore both an assertion of personal conviction and a record of how she prepared the book. The attribution to Hatch belongs to that claim; it does not establish verified posthumous authorship.
