The London Séance Society: A Novel

“Lenna found herself constantly asking How? How do you know for sure? And thought she’d attended one séance a few years ago, nothing convincing had come of it. Certainly, no ghosts has appeared.

It was maddening, this truth-versus-illusion business.”

Lenna’s internal questioning of whether the existence of ghosts can be proven emphasizes the limits of rationality. Lenna’s framing of “truth-versus-illusion” suggests that she sees these concepts as mutually exclusive at this stage in the novel, and only when she immerses herself fully in various aspects of the supernatural will she finally come to accept the hidden truths of spiritualism.

“At her touch, Lenna felt like she’d been flipped upside down, then righted again.”

This passage represents the narrative’s first suggestion that Lenna harbors romantic and sexual desires for other women. The intensity of her reaction also emphasizes the depths of her half-acknowledged feelings for Vaudeline, and the visceral experience of being “flipped upside down” foreshadows the profound ways in which her connections to Vaudeline will invert her entire worldview.

“If only I could run myself through a sieve, Lenna thought, and separate the feelings inside of me so to better deal with them one by one.”

By equating her conflicting feelings to a jumble that can only be clarified via a deeper examination, Lenna emphasizes the many internal and external tensions that threaten to rip her emotional well-being to shreds. Her desire to “separate” her feelings emphasizes her scientific understanding of the world, for when faced with something as intangible as emotions (or ghosts, as the case may be), her first impulse is to put these intangible things under a metaphorical microscope to ascertain their true nature.