The Sweet By and By

“What a treat this novel is, a wonderful collision of eras that’s sensuous and ethereal at the same time, but also full of compelling mysteries.” —Diane Ackerman "So you don't believe in ghosts?"Jude asked one evening. "And you do?" I whispered back. "Sometimes I wish I did. I would come back to you…" When Helen West is contracted to write a definitive essay on Maggie Fox, the founder of American Spiritualism, she begins to wonder if departed spirits do indeed return to comfort their loved ones. After all, Maggie Fox made a living by convincing people that the dead spoke through her. By incorporating tricks such as rigging apples on strings to make knocking noises, her séances attracted the likes of Horace Greeley and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. Throughout the course of her research, Helen, recovering from the death of her lover, develops a strange, unexpected kinship with Maggie. When she hears knocking in her old farmhouse in upstate New York, she can't help but wonder if it is her old lover attempting to communicate with her. Is death the end? To what lengths will people go to comfort themselves after the death of a loved one? Helen confronts these questions and others in a captivating, haunting novel that effortlessly weaves together two stories that take place more than one hundred years apart. "I read [this novel] in two sittings, eager to learn how the lives and love stories turned out, and simply fascinated by the historical accuracy ... Before I realized it, I was swept up in Maggie and Helen's intersecting worlds: those they make, those they inherit, those they intuit, those they're hauled into by others. One of the book's many charms is how wisely it reveals the values and passions of two women from very different eras who, nonetheless, have everything in common." —DIANE ACKERMAN, author of A Natural History of the Senses "A sensitive, affectionate, and appealing portrait of [Maggie Fox,] the uneducated girl who at fourteen escaped rural poverty and a drunken, abusive father to become America's first and most famous Spiritualist medium." —ALISON LURIE, Pulitzer Prize—winning author of Foreign Affairs "[Mackin's] narrator, while asserting that she is no 'hagiographer of spurious mystics,' is an engaging woman, solid in her station, widely conversant with the deeper reaches of the paranormal, and magically involved with her quest. Here she leads the mind in a chase as she finds herself tempted to believe in the return of departed spirits, in a prose that is as amiable to read as the palm of a hand. A haunting book in every way. Masterly and fervent." —PAUL WEST, author of The Secret Lives of Words "Jeanne Mackin has written a multilayered, multigenerational story of a spirited encounter with the spirit world. One hundred and fifty years are but the brief blink of an eye under this author's imaginative scrutiny, and she enlivens in The Sweet By and By both the quick and the dead." —NICHOLAS DELBANCO, author of What Remains

From Publishers Weekly

The strange-but-true history of Maggie Fox, 19th-century founder of the American Spiritualist movement, haunts a 20th-century journalist in this double-barreled tale of love and loss. Mackin (Dreams of Empire; Queen's War; etc.) skips between Fox's story and that of middle-aged magazine writer Helen West, who takes on an assignment to write an essay about Maggie and her sister Katie. In 1848, the two inventive children drew crowds by claiming that they were receiving spirit messages at their home in upstate New York; in fact, they had devised a clever system involving hidden hammers and cracking joints. The "Hydesville Rappings," as they were dubbed, gained popularity, and the Fox girls were swept off to New York City, where they performed s‚ances for the likes of Horace Greeley. As Helen uncovers this bizarre tale, she begins to feel a kinship with Maggie, an unhappy child who grew up too quickly in a harsh environment. Like Helen, who has been mourning the death of her married lover, Jude, for three years, Maggie also lost her one great love, Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane, and spent the rest of her sorrow-filled life communing with his ghost. Although Helen is not a believer at first, she soon finds herself spooked by mysterious bumps in the night. She believes she feels Jude's presence, and a desperate hope of seeing him again persists even as a new man attempts to woo her. Mackin shifts skillfully between these two atmospheric worlds, and once she tones down the overwritten prose of the first few chapters, the dual narrative acquires rhythm. Intelligent if predictable in its setup, the novel pays homage to two strong women separated by history but united in spirit. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Is death the end? Do ghosts exist? What is faith? Mackin examines these and related issues in a totally nonmacabre manner, telling in tandem two stories that take place about 150 years apart. In 1998, journalist Helen West, while mourning the death of her married lover, Jude, researches the strange life of Maggie Fox, called the Founder of American Spiritualism. Maggie became famous after 1848 when, with her sisters' help, she developed a large following eager to contact the spirits of dearly departed loved ones. Helen becomes involved with her subject and with the concept of the possibility of returning spirits. Can they comfort those they love? Can one enter a loving relationship with another before finding closure with the deceased, previous loved one? This well-written tale is sympathetically conceived and entertainingly presented. Recommended.DEllen R. Cohen, Rockville, MD Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

What toll can grief extract from a life? This is the question that Mackin (Dreams of Empire, 1996) asks of her two main characters as their lives interweave in history. Helen West is a modern-day journalist seeking to recover from the devastating death of her lover. To do so, she is investigating the life of Maggie Fox, founder of the American spiritualism movement in the 1800s. As Helen writes an article on Maggie's tragic, brutal, and oddly heroic life, she begins to experience some of the same events that the visitors to Maggie's seances experienced. Living alone now, in a huge drafty Victorian manor house, off by itself at the side of a wood, Helen is the perfect candidate for a ghost story. Mackin controls Helen's spiral down into the terror of Maggie's life with a fine hand. In a mix of historical biography and lyrical prose, Mackin conjures Victorian America into a wholly realized world and brings to life two women the reader can only cheer and cry for. Despite a rather hackneyed end, the result is a lovely novel. Neal WyattCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Jeanne Mackin teaches creative writing at Goddard College in Vermont and has taught or conducted workshops in Pennsylvania, Hawaii and New York.  She lives with her husband, artist Steve Poleskie, in upstate New York. She is also the author of several novels:  The Beautiful American, Dreams of Empire, The Queen's War, and The Frenchwoman.

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