‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’: Anna Kingsford’s Dreams and Dream-Stories (1888)

Merchant discusses Anna Kingsford’s Dreams and Dream-Stories (1888), which was edited by her companion and editor Edward Maitland and termed by Oscar Wilde ‘remarkable.’ Qualifying as a doctor in 1880 and being an ardent spiritualist, anti-vivisectionist, and feminist, Kingsford wrote in her 1886 preface to the volume that through dreams she had acquired ‘priceless insights and illuminations.’ Merchant shows that in Dreams and Dream-Stories Kingsford reappropriates an association between femininity and reverie that was negative and gives it a positive polarity, to turn it into a source of power. Such writing, however, which aimed to reproduce ‘the grammar of dreaming,’ was risky because it explored the creative potential of exactly that sort of surrender to the imagination which in addition to being gendered as feminine was, for the Victorians, equated with disordered thinking. Having ‘Opposition to Materialism’ as a central theme and ‘organising principle,’ Kingsford’s text also simultaneously resisted patriarchal power and defied the canons of classical realism. Merchant shows that Kingsford’s volume was important in opening a way for future female writing as seen in Olive Schreiner’s Dreams (1890), the work of Virginia Woolf, and in turn écriture féminine.