A highly original study that examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers, and believers during the golden age of spiritualism in the late Victorian era, The Darkened Room is more than a meditation on women mediums—it's an exploration of the era's gender relations. The hugely popular spiritualist movement, which maintained that women were uniquely qualified to commune with spirits of the dead, offered female mediums a new independence, authority, and potential to undermine conventional class and gender relations in the home and in society. Using previously unexamined sources and an innovative approach, Alex Owen invokes the Victorian world of darkened séance rooms, theatrical apparitions, and moving episodes of happiness lost and regained. She charts the struggles between spiritualists and the medical and legal establishments over the issue of female mediumship, and provides new insights into the gendered dynamics of Victorian society.

Depression spreads like a contagion through families, affecting everyone's lives, especially children's. The spouses of people with depression are several times more likely to become depressed themselves; their children are four to six times more likely. Drawing from a comprehensive, long-term study of resilient children from depressed families, "Out of the Darkened Room" outlines a wide array of prevention strategies, from the family meeting to open and sustained communication on the subject of mental illness. Dr. Beardslee weaves together his own personal and clinical experiences with the emerging scientific research, the key theoretical concepts, and the steps families need to take in order to make sense of the illness. -- This is the first book to look at depression as an illness that affects the entire family, not just the individual. -- Just as The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce tracked the impact of divorce on children, "Out of the Darkened Room" examines the long-term effects of parental depression. -- Major depression is one and a half to three times more common among immediate family members than among the general population. -- Beardslee's 20-year longitudinal study has established the accepted protocol for treating families struggling with a parent who is depressed.

Completely updated for the twenty-first century, this reference presents definitions and origins of thousands of words, idioms, catchphrases, slogans, nicknames, and events from TV, literature, music, comic strips, and computer games.

A warrior woman and her dark twin are destined to remake the world in this “powerful” tale, the first in a trilogy by a World Fantasy Award winner (Newsweek). Legend foretold the child named Jenna, who was three-times orphaned before she could crawl, a fate that would leave her in the hands of women who worshipped the benevolent goddess Great Alta. In this world without men, Jenna comes of age, learning quickly the skills of close combat. But her most powerful gift lies elsewhere: a mirror sister who emerges only in the darkness—a twin named Skada—and shares the soul of the young, white-haired warrior who might well be the goddess reborn. But if Jenna is, in truth, the one whose coming is awaited, there is cause for great alarm among those who rule the Dales, for the prophecy speaks of upheaval and change, and a devastating end of all things. An incomparable world-builder and one of America’s premier fantasists, the remarkable Jane Yolen begins a three-part saga as inventive, intelligent, and exciting as anything that has ever been produced in the literature of the fantastic. Brilliantly contrasting the “true” story of Jenna with the later myths, poetry, and so-called scholarship that her coming engendered, Yolen creates a culture as richly imagined as those found in the acclaimed novels of Ursula K. Le Guin. A truly magnificent work, Sister Light, Sister Dark takes fantasy fiction to wondrous places it has never gone before.

It is a time of heavy persecution in China. Christiana Tsai becomes a follower of Christ. An autobiography, Queen of the Dark Chamber exposes Christiana’s severe suffering because of her conversion. Through her, however, the light and life of the gospel and the glory of Christ is revealed. Step into her life and taste the bitterness of sin around her and the brilliant sweetness of Christ’s light in the midst of trial.