This book weaves pyschology, history, pyschobiography and literary analysis to show that writers such as Conan Doyle, Lodge, Barrie, Kipling, Woolf, Owen and Huxley, among others, engaged with mysticism and spiritualism in a manner which was not deluded, but at least in some situations was more ethical, creative and therapeutic in its form of mourning, as opposed to the drawing of solace from state sanctioned representations of mourning such as war memorials.