England's lost Eden

In 1871, at the height of the imperial century, a farm labourer's daughter appeared in rural Suffolk, claiming to be the new Messiah. Not only had Christ told her this in a series of visions, but she had His stigmata to prove it. Over the next decade, Mary Ann Girling would create a celibate sect out of her millenarian beliefs, first in a railway arch in south London, then in the New Forest - a place where witchcraft still flourished and whose woods were invested with ancient spirits of their own." "As Mrs Girling and her New Forest Shakers awaited the Apocalypse, just a few fields away an eccentric barrister, Andrew Peterson, was constructing a 200-foot-high concrete tower as a monument to spiritualism - having received its plans from the long-dead spirit of Sir Christopher Wren. Meanwhile, on the other side of the forest at Broadlands, the century's most eminent art critic, John Ruskin, joined William and Georgiana Cowper - he the illegitimate son of a prime minister, she the fey patroness of the Pre-Raphaelites - at the seance table. Ruskin was searching for the spirit of his dead love, Rose La Touche; but his explorations into the after-life would eventually send him insane." "In one way or another, Mary Ann Girling's bizarre quest would gather these figures into the dark heart of the forest itself. In England's Lost Eden, Philip Hoare brings a brilliant voice to these strange stories, painting a new portrait of Victorian England: a story of psychic disorder in an avowed age of reason