I’ve been researching the life and work of the late-nineteenth-century actress, writer, theatre producer, and occultist Florence Farr since 2012. Florence Farr (1860–1917) has only recently begun to emerge from the footnotes of history. For years she was remembered mainly as the lover or muse of George Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats, or as a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. For the past five years, I’ve been gathering research toward a play about her extraordinary life.
 

In 2017, in association with Treadwell’s Bookshop, I produced a centenary celebration, A Woman’s Century, at the Theosophical Society. The event supported a breast cancer charity and brought together experts, academics, and scholars for a morning of talks, followed by an afternoon featuring musical demonstrations of Farr’s chanting of poetry and atmospheric candlelit performances of her Egyptian plays co-written with Olivia Shakespear. This beautiful celebration helped spark a series of further events led by leading Florence Farr experts, and I’ve been proud to contribute to them.
 

My independent research has taken me through major archives and manuscript collections across the UK and Ireland, where I’ve read Farr’s (and her collaborators’) letters, notebooks, plays, novels, and private journals. This labour of love has been entirely self-funded and therefore slow, but deeply rewarding. It has brought me to the Warburg Institute, Senate House Library, King’s College London, the University of Reading, the National Library of Ireland, the British Library, and various private collections. Through this work, I uncovered a long-lost sensation novel she wrote in 1897, which I transcribed and published online earlier this year.

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Some of my exciting discoveries have been shared in my lectures and creative demonstrations “Florence Farr: Magic as Art” and “Florence Farr & the Magical Voice”. I have presented at the Theosophical Society, the annual conference day Florence Farr and the Magical Imagination, The College of Psychic Studies in London, and The Museum of Wisdom, Magic & Mystery in Glastonbury.​

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Scroll down to learn more about Florence Farr and find links to my work. You can also subscribe to my Substack and follow my Instagram to stay updated on my research discoveries and my writing journey as I develop the Florence Farr play.