In 1904, Emily Grant Hutchings spent twenty-four weeks reporting on the wonders of the World's Fair, producing a newspaper story nearly every day. An educated, accomplished writer, she had already published fiction, poetry, journalism, and art criticism. She knew how to recognize a remarkable story—and how to tell one. Nine years later, she would help introduce a phenomenon more extraordinary than anything she had reported from the exposition. It required no exhibition hall, only a wooden board, a willing friend, and a little patience. [1]
That friend was Pearl Curran, a former music teacher and aspiring singer whose formal education had ended early. Married to John Curran, a businessman and former immigration official, she occupied the respectable domestic world of the early twentieth century. Her close companion Emily was thirteen years older, considerably more experienced in literary matters, and fascinated by spiritualism. When their husbands gathered to play cards, the women amused themselves with a Ouija board, sometimes joined by Pearl's mother, Mary Pollard, who took down the messages. What began as an evening diversion became a regular appointment. [2]
Emily was the enthusiast; Pearl, by contemporary accounts, required persuasion. For months the board produced mostly nonsense. Then, on June 22, 1913, the planchette began repeatedly spelling three letters: P-A-T. On July 8, the message became a name: “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come—Patience Worth my name.” [3]
Patience described herself, reluctantly, as an Englishwoman of the seventeenth century who had crossed the Atlantic and died in colonial America. No convincing historical record of her life has been established. She was evasive about her origins but remarkably forthcoming about everything else: spirited, devout, sarcastic, sometimes flirtatious, and possessed of an apparently inexhaustible appetite for words. She dispensed aphorisms, scolded her questioners, composed verse, and eventually dictated entire novels. Among her earliest interrogators was Emily, whose literary instincts occasionally ran afoul of the spirit's less conventional grammar. When Emily objected to Patience's use of thee rather than thou, Patience responded with a defense of the humble turnip over the russet. Even a ghost, it seemed, could resent an editor. [3]
Initially, the arrangement depended upon two women sharing the planchette. But as Patience's literary abilities developed, so did Pearl's apparent independence. Other sitters could take Emily's place without diminishing the results. Eventually Pearl dispensed with the board altogether, receiving Patience's words in vivid mental images and dictating them aloud. The professional writer who had recognized the voice was no longer necessary to its performance. [4]
The surviving record makes the change particularly revealing. In January 1915, John Curran assumed responsibility for compiling the transcripts and accused Emily of introducing her own alterations into earlier communications. He removed what he considered her contributions and declared that Patience spoke just as readily without her. These were John's judgments, not impartial findings. Emily had been the early record's editor and custodian; now her editorial hand was being erased in the name of preserving its authenticity. The document itself became an argument over authorship. [3]
There were other disappointments. According to later historical research, Emily had hoped to write about Patience herself, but that opportunity passed to newspaperman Casper S. Yost, whose enthusiastic articles and 1916 book helped make Pearl and Patience nationally famous. Emily's responses were contradictory and perhaps revealing. Privately, she questioned Pearl's motives and trustworthiness in correspondence with psychical researcher James Hyslop. Publicly, she defended the Patience Worth phenomenon against accusations of fraud. She had not necessarily ceased believing in the voice; she may simply have disputed who possessed the right to speak for it. [5]
The distinction mattered. Emily had studied literature, taught classical languages, and spent years establishing her professional reputation. Pearl, whose principal artistic training was musical, now appeared to produce sophisticated writing with an ease that astonished critics. Such accomplishments were particularly remarkable in an era when female authorship still required negotiation with predominantly male literary gatekeepers. The séance offered an unexpected freedom: a woman could speak with extraordinary authority, provided the words belonged to someone else.
Emily understood something of the paradox already. In 1902, she had corresponded with Mark Twain about the frustrations of literary ambition. Twain assured her that “name and sex are not factors” in judging literary merit and recommended the workings of “unconscious cerebration.” Remarkably, Emily's own 1914 biography attributed much of her creative process to precisely such spontaneous, subconscious activity. She knew the experience of words arriving almost fully formed. But it was Pearl whose unconscious—or whose visitor, depending upon one's convictions—had become a sensation. [1, 6]
Emily's next literary collaboration was with a rather more recognizable spirit. Beginning in 1915, she and another woman, Lola V. Hays, claimed to receive a novel dictated by the deceased Mark Twain. Published in 1917 as Jap Herron, the book attracted considerable publicity and unfavorable criticism. Twain's daughter and publishers objected, ultimately prompting its withdrawal in 1918. Where Patience had emerged from obscurity to literary celebrity, Emily's new collaborator brought with him an established reputation, a publishing contract, and lawyers. [6, 7]
Pearl's life, meanwhile, became inseparable from Patience's. In 1916, following instructions attributed to the spirit, the Currans adopted a daughter they named Patience Worth—affectionately called Patience Wee. The unseen author had become, in the family's understanding, something approaching another mother. Yet Pearl also began publishing fiction under her own name. Her 1919 story Rosa Alvaro, Entrante, later adapted for film, concerned a young woman transformed by the belief that another personality existed within her. Whether playful invention, personal reflection, or something more revealing, its resemblance to Pearl's own circumstances is difficult to overlook. [8]
Success did not ensure security. John died in 1922, shortly before the birth of Pearl's biological daughter, Eileen. Financial difficulties eventually obliged Pearl to travel and give public demonstrations. She remarried, moved west, and continued receiving Patience's communications until shortly before her death in 1937. Emily, whose writing career had begun long before the séances, outlived her by more than two decades, dying in 1960. [5, 8]
It is tempting to interpret their estrangement as jealousy, deception, or a contest between belief and disbelief. The evidence supports no such simple verdict. Emily could have been wounded by exclusion while sincerely believing that something remarkable had happened. Pearl could have believed herself a vessel while discovering an extraordinary creative power within herself. And Patience—whether spirit, persona, or invention—may have been the means by which one woman found her voice and another lost her place beside it.
Patience is an historic fiction, informed by the surviving record but free to contemplate what the record cannot preserve: the confidences of two intimate friends, the pleasures of their private pastime, the competing meanings they may have found in it, and the silence that followed.
For whatever moved the planchette, the women had encountered something together. The mystery was not merely whether Patience Worth existed.
It was who, in the end, got to have her.