Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgments
A Note on Names
Introduction
1. Sex, Suffrage, and Religious Seekers
2. "A Clairvoyant of the First Water"
3. "Better Come"
4. "The Bomb-shell from the Dugpa World"
5. Fantasizing the Occult
6. "Our Golden Word: Try"
7. The Lady Mrs. X
8. Disseminating New Ideas
9. Music of the Spheres
10. "Dear Friend and Sister"
11. Who Tells the Tale?
Epilogue: Seeking Laura
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Promotional Information

A southern lady and her spiritual quest

About the Author

Diane Sasson received her doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Shaker Spiritual Narrative (1983) and articles on American folklore and communal societies. She was Director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program at Duke University, and served as President of the National Association of Graduate Liberal Studies. For the last decade, she has been on the faculty at Vanderbilt University.

Reviews

DianeSasson's excellent biography of Laura Holloway-Langford (1843–1930) uses evidence from letter collections, 29 books, and more than 80 articles that Holloway-Langford published from1868 to 1917, show how Holloway-Langford challenged traditional values that circumscribed women's lives.
*Nova Religio*

As Sasson's title suggests, there is an inherent ambiguity in the life of [Laura Holloway-Langford]. On the one hand, there is the spiritual quest from liberal Protestantism to spiritualism to theosophy to Buddhism; on the other, there is her pragmatically progressive critique of sexual norms and her championing of women's rights (though she was ambivalent about suffrage), women's labor, and the agenda of the New Woman.
*Journal of American History*

Yearning for the New Age will be particularly insightful to those who study the development of alternative religions—including Spiritualism, Shakerism, and Theosophy—in the United States and the roles of women within such traditions. . . . Along its richly detailed biography, readers of Yearning for the New Age will encounter important additions and new materials that will deepen historical understandings of New Age movements in America.
*American Studies*