UNDERHILL, Evelyn.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Grey World. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed on a slip mounted on the front free endpaper, "For Mrs. Reynolds, with much love & most humble respect from her friend Evelyn". The recipient was likely the author's friend and fellow novelist Gertrude Minnie Baillie Reynolds (1861-1939), who published books under her maiden name of Robins. The Grey World was Underhill's first novel. She wrote it during her brief period of engagement with spiritualism, in which she participated in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The novel concerns a child, Willie, who dies and becomes "a little ghost adrift in a strange world... a thin, grey, unsubstantial world" (p. 7) akin to the Catholic purgatory. He is reborn into a new body, but retains the memories of this experience, and can communicate with beings trapped in the purgatorial "grey world". As an adult, he pursues a release from a purely material existence and eventual spiritual fulfilment.

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