Nancy Rubin Stuart, Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox - This is an intriguing biography of Maggie Fox who, along with her sister, Katy, started the spiritualist movement that talked with the dead during the middle of the eighteenth century in Hydesville, New York. Nancy Ruben Stuart makes a sound argument that teenage Maggie, bored with the small town after living in Rochester, created the weird knockings that she and her sibling claimed were deceased people communicating through them. The word of what the Fox sisters could do spread and people came from miles around for a reading. Married sister Leah saw a chance for them to make money and soon a movement spread across the country. However, at nineteen years old, Maggie fell in love with Arctic explorer Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, who demanded she stopped what he considered a nasty hoax, spiritualism. In her sixties she confessed that spiritualism was a fraud although she continued to give s ances.

This biography is fascinating as it provides a deep sense of time and place (upstate New York was a hot bed for cult activities) as well as a powerful look at Maggie and her family. The author contends that spiritualism still has a hold on people in the twenty-first century with New Age movements like the psychic hotline. Readers will appreciate this strong glimpse at a teen who shammed a nation.

Harcourt, 2005, $25.00, 393 pp.
ISBN: 0151010137

Harriet Klausner