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Hester Dowden (1868–1949), also known as Hester Travers Smith, was an Irish spiritualist Mediumship who is most notable for having claimed to contact the spirits of Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare and other writers. Dowden's writings were published by various authors. She wrote Voices from the Void (1919), an account of her life as a medium, and Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde (1924)Hester Travers Smith, Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde (London: Werner Laurie, 1924) archive.org.
Dowden was the daughter of the Irish literary scholar Edward Dowden. She used both her maiden name and her married name Hester Travers Smith. Her husband was a prominent Dublin physician. Dowden was closely linked to the Irish literary world through her father, knowing, among others W. B. Yeats and Bram Stoker. She was probably the model for the medium in Yeats's play, The Words upon the Window Pane. Her daughter, the Abbey Theatre stage designer Dorothy Travers-Smith, married the playwright Lennox Robinson.Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY., 2002, pp. 13. Though she wrote only two books under her own name, her writings provided the basis for approximately twelve books published by other authors.Her first book was published as "Hester Travers Smith", but she was generally later known as Dowden. See Hester Dowden, Gale Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology.
She was closely associated with William Fletcher Barrett, the psychical researcher. She was also responsible for introducing Geraldine Cummins to mediumship.
Dowden set up as a professional medium after she became convinced of her powers. In Voices from the Void she claimed that the spirit of Hugh Lane, who had drowned in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, spoke to her before she knew of his death in the disaster. Her son-in-law Lennox Robinson and a vicar were present when the communication came through. However, Lane's death had been reported in the papers that very day. Dowden claimed not to have read them.
She claimed Wilde also demonstrated that he had no homosexual inclinations, but instead revealed his utter adoration of womankind. "My sensations were so varied with regard to your sex, dear lady, that you would find painted on my heart – that internal organ so often quoted by the vulgar – you would find every shade of desire there, and even more... Women were ever to me a cluster of stars. They contained for me all, and more than all, that God has created." Dowden also received a new play, entitled Is it a Forgery?, from Wilde, which was written in the spirit world.Travers Smith, Hester, "How I Received Oscar Wilde's Spirit Play", The Graphic, 10 March 1928.
James Joyce read the book and parodied the conversations with Wilde in Finnegans Wake, in which Wilde spouts gibberish to a medium, "Tell the woyld I have lived true thousand hells. Pity, please, lady, for poor O.W. in this profundust snobbing I have caught. Nine dirty years mine age, hairs hoar, mummeries failend, snowdrift to my elpow, deff as Adder. I askt you, dear lady, to judge on my tree by our fruits. I gave you of the tree."
Dowden was later contacted by Percy Allen who wanted to prove that Shakespeare's works were written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, not Bacon. On this occasion the "spirits" confirmed Allen's views. It was "revealed" that Oxford was the leader of a collaborative effort among poets and scholars to create the works. Another "revelation" was that Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream was a portrait of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, who was in fact the illegitimate son of Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I.Helen Sword, "Modernist Hauntology: James Joyce, Hester Dowden, and Shakespeare's Ghost", Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol 41. Issue: 2., 1999, pp.-192-196.Shapiro, James (2010), Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, UK edition: Faber and Faber (US edition: Simon & Schuster), pp.196–210.
The "spirit of Bacon" told Allen that he had been misquoted when Dowden had received the messages she passed on to Dodd, but that Dowden was not to blame because another spirit had garbled the message on that occasion. Dowden's biographer Edmund Bentley later confirmed that Allen's was the final and true revelation, that from his teenage years Allen had been destined to be the bearer of the ultimate truth: "a plan had been worked out by spirit people interested in his earthly life that he should be the means of finally unravelling the great mystery of Shakespeare's origin and work."Edmund Bentley, Far Horizon: A Biography of Hester Dowden: Medium and Psychic Investigator, London: Rider Company, 1951. For a more recent discussion of Dowden see Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY., 2002. These events forced Allen to stand down as president of the Oxfordian organisation the Shakespeare Fellowship.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> PDF of Dowden's book Voices from the Void.
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