Letters to Juliet: Is There Life After Death?

Juliet Goodenow believed that Life is both religion and science. That the two are sisters in one thought and purpose: The creation of Life is scientific; the unfolding of Life is religion. Around the time of World War I, she discovered that she was able to telepathically receive messages from people who were dead. At the turn of the 20th century there was a growing interest in psychic phenomena, led by Frederic Myers, a Cambridge, England classic scholar and writer. He was heavily involved in the investigation of the afterlife and subsequently co-founded the British Society for Psychical Research. Myers speculated that there was a deep region of the unconscious, the "subliminal self," which could account for paranormal events and coined the term "telepathy," derived from the Greek terms tele (distant) and pathe (occurrence or feeling). Myers invites "a few of my friends" to participate: William Ewart Gladstone, William Shakespeare, Patrick Henry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Henry Ward Beecher, Disraeli, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and William James. He invites them to discuss world matters and to relay the information from each person "present at the meeting" into the conscious mind of Mrs. Goodenow. Myers then asks her to explain how she is able to differentiate between the speakers. Psychic writer Colin Wilson pronounced Myers' 'cross-correspondences', a series of messages from the other side to different mediums in different parts of the world, to be "the most persuasive evidence for the existence for the afterlife." On their own they would mean nothing, but when put together they would make sense. Juliet Goodenow was one of those mediums and in this book, Letters to Juliet, she transcribes the messages telepathically relayed to her by Frederic Myers. Interest in telepathy increased following World War I as thousands of the bereaved turned toward Spiritualism attempting to communicate with their dead loved ones, evidenced by the long-running popularity of her sister's book, Thy Son Liveth: Messages from a Soldier to his Mother.