Life and career
Emma Floyd trained in music and worked on the stage before she travelled from London to the United States. In New York in the 1850s she encountered Spiritualist circles and became known, under the name Emma Hardinge, as a medium and lecturer. The ability to address a crowded hall on a subject proposed by the audience helped make her one of the movement’s most sought-after speakers. She described such addresses as inspired by spirits.
She returned to Britain in 1865 and continued to lecture on both sides of the Atlantic. With her husband William Britten she also travelled to Australia, where public lectures helped connect local Spiritualist societies. Later, working in Manchester, she helped establish the weekly newspaper The Two Worlds. A movement often associated with private séances had, through Britten’s efforts, an extensive public record in print.
Work and ideas
Modern American Spiritualism (1870) grew out of her participation in the movement she was describing. Britten collected reports, testimony and material from newspapers to tell the history of its early decades. In Nineteenth Century Miracles she widened the inquiry to several continents. Both books preserve material about people and local organisations that might otherwise have vanished, alongside Britten’s own conviction about the cause of the phenomena.
Ghost Land presents a different question of authorship. The 1876 title page credits the unnamed author of Art Magic with the narrative and names Britten as translator and editor. That documented editorial role explains her place in the catalogue. The narrator’s identity and the experiences claimed in the narrative remain separate historical questions.
