The Winged Bull is the first of Fortune’s novels to be written with the intention of catalysing initiatory experience in their readers. Fortune believed that her novels could catalyse initiation in individuals and, through them, bring about the regeneration of British society, allowing it to become the forerunner of an inevitable movement into a new era of spiritual enlightenment: the New Age. While the idea of textual initiation was by no means unique to Fortune, the intended audience of her texts represented a distinctly twentieth-century market for the psycho-spiritual experience of literary initiation. In this chapter I will focus on the way Fortune’s work was explicitly oriented towards a particular audience, the interwar British middle classes, to whom she believed she could offer a psycho-spiritual regeneration that would bring a new outlook on life and the healing of sexual, emotional, and mental health issues. I will explore Fortune’s relationship with Modernism and the stylistic choices she made to ensure her work was accessible. I will argue that Fortune’s work was underpinned by a commitment to removing unnecessary barriers to participation in the occult. She was particularly dismissive of economic and social barriers, repeatedly rejecting the ring-fencing of occultism because of financial status and gender. She believed that more equity within the occult world would lead to more participation by women, which would more quickly catalyse the larger evolutionary process of initiation.

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‘Normality and simplicity andcommon decency’: The Winged Bull’s Middle-Class Magic

  • Georgia van Raalte

摘要

The Winged Bull is the first of Fortune’s novels to be written with the intention of catalysing initiatory experience in their readers. Fortune believed that her novels could catalyse initiation in individuals and, through them, bring about the regeneration of British society, allowing it to become the forerunner of an inevitable movement into a new era of spiritual enlightenment: the New Age. While the idea of textual initiation was by no means unique to Fortune, the intended audience of her texts represented a distinctly twentieth-century market for the psycho-spiritual experience of literary initiation. In this chapter I will focus on the way Fortune’s work was explicitly oriented towards a particular audience, the interwar British middle classes, to whom she believed she could offer a psycho-spiritual regeneration that would bring a new outlook on life and the healing of sexual, emotional, and mental health issues. I will explore Fortune’s relationship with Modernism and the stylistic choices she made to ensure her work was accessible. I will argue that Fortune’s work was underpinned by a commitment to removing unnecessary barriers to participation in the occult. She was particularly dismissive of economic and social barriers, repeatedly rejecting the ring-fencing of occultism because of financial status and gender. She believed that more equity within the occult world would lead to more participation by women, which would more quickly catalyse the larger evolutionary process of initiation.