Speaking through a Ouija board operated by Pearl Lenore Curran, a 30-year-old St. Louis housewife of limited education, Patience Worth was nothing short of a national phenomenon in the early years of the 20th Century. Though her works are virtually forgotten today, the prestigious Braithwaite anthology listed five of her poems among the nation’s best published in 1917, and the New York Times hailed her first novel as a “feat of literary composition.” Her output was stunning. In addition to seven books, she produced over 5,000 poems, short stories, and plays — nearly four million words between 1913 and 1937. Some evenings she worked on a novel, a poem and a play simultaneously, alternating her dictation from one to another without missing a beat.
Almost overnight, Patience transformed Pearl Curran from a restless homemaker plagued by nervous ailments into a busy celebrity who traveled the country giving performances starring Patience. Night after night Pearl, a tall, blue-eyed woman in a fashionable dress, would sit with her Ouija board while her husband, John, recorded Patience’s utterances in shorthand. Those who witnessed the performances, some of them leading scholars, feminists, politicians and writers, believed they’d seen a miracle.
Through Pearl, Patience claimed to be an unmarried Englishwoman who had emigrated to Nantucket Island in the late 1600s and been killed in an Indian raid. For three centuries, she said, she’d searched for an earthly “crannie” (as in “cranium”) to help her fulfill a burning literary ambition. She’d found it at last in Pearl. When a classical language professor asked Patience how and why she used the language of so many different periods, she responded: “I do plod a twist of a path and it hath run from then till now.” When asked to explain how she could dictate responses without a pause, she replied: “Ye see, man setteth up his cup and fillet it, but I be as the stream.”
Patience’s most celebrated work, The Sorry Tale, a 644-page, 325,000 word novel about the last days of Jesus, was released in June 1917. As journalist Casper Yost, who was present when much of the book was dictated, explained, the story was begun without any previous knowledge on the part of Pearl Curran of the time and conditions of Palestine beyond what is revealed in the New Testament. Yet, the story goes far beyond what could be gathered from the New Testament. “In one evening, 5,000 words were dictated, covering the account of the crucifixion,” Yost reported.
In its review of the book, The National wondered how the mysterious storyteller became familiar with the scent and sound and color and innumerable properties of Oriental market places and wildernesses, of Roman palaces, and halls of justice. The New York Globe stated that it exceeded Ben Hur and Quo Vadis as “a quaint realistic narrative.” The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch opined that no other book gives one so clear a view of customs, manners, and character of the peoples of the time and place.
Professor Roland Greene User, dean of history at Washington University, called The Sorry Tale “the greatest story of Christ penned since the Gospels were finished.” He pointed out that the book was written in seventeenth-century English with no anachronisms.
William Marion Reedy, the editor of Reedy’s Mirror, a highly-regarded literary journal with an international circulation, studied the works of Patience Worth. While Reedy conceded that her poems were “extraordinary” and “near great,” he at first concluded that someone with a special literary interest in older English poetry was guilty of a hoax. When Reedy was invited to attend one of Curran’s sessions, he accepted and was immediately intrigued. He would sit with Curran through a number of sessions and carry on a dialogue with Patience Worth. The scholarly Reedy literally fell in love with Patience Worth.
In the Mirror of October 1, 1915, Reedy told the world of his “flirtation” with Patience Worth. He explained that he had ruled out “fakery” and stated that he had absolutely no question as to the integrity of the parties involved. He further noted that Curran did not always understand his questions or the responses by Patience Worth. He called the spiritual content of Patience’s poetry “an archaic Wordsworthianism, with a somewhat of Emersonism.” He described Patience as “piquant” (having a pleasantly sharp taste or appetizing flavor; pleasantly stimulating or exciting to the mind) in the extreme, witty and aphoristic in a homely way, and saucy but never rude. “She will not answer personal questions about herself or tell you the usual stock things of so many spirit communications,” he wrote, “about lost jack-knives in the distant past, or when your wealthy grandmother is going to die . . . None of that stuff goes with Patience . . . She is ready with repartee and she says things that probe the character of her questioners.”
But Reedy rejected the idea that Patience Worth was a spirit, stating that he simply could not believe it possible for the dead to talk to the living. He considered the secondary personality theory, and even asked Patience if she and Mrs. Curran were the same entity. Patience, who called Pearl her “harp,” immediately lashed out at the suggestion with the sharp retort, “She be but she and I be me,” and ended her discourse on the subject.
W. T. Allison, professor of English literature at the University of Manitoba, observed that Patience Worth dictated words found only in Milton’s time and some of them had no meaning until researched in dialectic dictionaries and old books. Allison, who closely observed Curran, reported that in one evening 15 poems were produced in an hour and 15 minutes, an average of five minutes for each poem. “All were poured out with a speed that Tennyson or Browning could never have hoped to equal, and some of the 15 lyrics are so good that either of those great poets might be proud to have written them,” Allison offered. He went on to say that Patience Worth “must be regarded as the outstanding phenomenon of our age, and I cannot help thinking of all time.”
In 1922, the connection between the two of them began to deteriorate, possibly due to changes in Pearl’s life and the fact that she had become pregnant for the first time at age 39. After the death of her husband John Curran on June 1, 1922, who kept meticulous records of the Patience Worth sessions, the record of the Patience Worth s
