Patience Worth


Read by Lynne T

(4 stars; 2 reviews)

Patience Worth is an examination of the communications between a seventeenth century woman and a certain Mrs. Curran of St. Louis, in 1913. Contact with the spirit world or parlor trick? If the latter, it was well done: the quick-witted repartee appeared unrehearsed, the language was authentic, the references to English nature and life accurate, although Mrs. Curran had never visited England. Mrs. Curran, herself, was a smart, quick-witted socialite of good repute, unlikely to have been a fraudster. She did not 'perform' publicly, only in front of friends and invited guests, and never for money. She was a musician by training, not a writer or poet, yet many of the communications took the form of blank verse and were of a poetical nature. Since its publication, the phenomenon has been much studied and general view is that Patience Worth was the invention of Pearl Curran's imagination. In this volume, we are presented with the evidence and left to decide for ourselves. - Summary by Lynne Thompson (5 hr 5 min)

Chapters

The Coming of Patience Worth 7:51 Read by Lynne T
Nature of the Communications 30:45 Read by Lynne T
Personality of Patience 26:37 Read by Lynne T
The Poetry 48:12 Read by Lynne T
The Prose Part 1 37:49 Read by Lynne T
The Prose Part 2 34:15 Read by Lynne T
Conversations 55:32 Read by Lynne T
Religion 25:32 Read by Lynne T
The Ideas on Immorality 39:21 Read by Lynne T

Reviews

Otherworldly spirit's literary works interpreted by acolyte


(3 stars)

The spirit of Patience Worth has a lot to say, but none of it makes any sense. The "thee" and "thou" and other archaic words and phrases give a tone of historical fact to the work. The writer is obviously a fervent admirer of the spirit, but even he gets confused, calling her blank verse "impenetrable" and "mysterious". He insists that she speaks in metaphors and parables when things get too baffling. To me, much of Miss Worth's Ouija "utterances" seems like random words thrown together in the semblance of sentences. It makes me wonder what the so-called medium had in mind- perhaps she was not only duplicitous but insane?