A remarkable and mystical unpublished short story written in April 1898 by a young woman called ‘Ecila’ - presumably a reversal of her actual name, Alice - which presents as a sort of adolescent fever dream in which the young woman is led through a mystical landscape, distracted by Sensuality and finally arrives at a vision of the Goddess Truth. The identity of ‘A[lice] J’ as she signs herself at the end of the text may be recoverable but we have not managed to do so.
Small octavo (11.5x18c,) 7 folded card leaves, held by a dar-red velvet string; decorative cover; epigraph to the verso; 21pp text, circa 1800words. This is a working text with occasional corrections, neatly and legibly presented. In the story a young woman prays - in a non-religious manner - for a vision: “something I can love, and see with my physical eyes & worship with my spiritual strength.’ Before her, a flower manifests and grows and ‘changed day by day and at last it became a beautiful human form... and in either hand they hold a white lily’. He reveals himself to be ‘human love’ who is present to liberate the writer from ‘this terrible shadowland’ into a ‘delightful world of all great spirits.. some clothed in the flesh as you & I, and some unclothed but there they meet and there they all partake of the joys that are spiritual.’ In this realm she is distracted by the figure of sensuality who woos here with a flower of ‘feverish beauty how intense & passionate in its widespreading influence’ and leads her into the ‘the awful horror of this Darkness’ where ‘the light grew dim and there was a confusion of noises, wild rushing of water, fierce whirl winds’ and the writer is ‘sinking - sinking into an unfathomable abyss of darkness’ before another vision - ‘a woman singing in a glorious & prophetic voice’ - the Goddess Truth speaks to her ‘in a voice of softest music’ as the ‘strange faint light’ around her ‘was filled with music, lovely, mysterious and soft at first with with a grand crescendo of light...’ and ‘My soul went forth out of its prison house to meet all the glory of the sound... and touched the Gates of that Elysium, where dwells the Goddess Truth’.
