Thomas Hodd is an Associate Professor of English at Université de Moncton. He has published articles on spiritualism in Early Canadian literature, the occult activities of Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman, as well as Swedenborg´s influence on William Kirby. He is the editor of A Soldier´s Place: the War Stories of Will R. Bird (Nimbus), and is currently working on a critical edition of J.W.D. Moodie´s Spiritualism Album.

In Mary Melville, the Psychic, there is a little of everything to disturb smug, contented people – socialism, pantheism, theosophy, evolution, spiritism, in fact all the red pepper of modern doubt and speculation. But, most of all, there is spiritism.
- Henry Franklin Gadsby

Mary Melville, The Psychic (1900) is an extraordinary Canadian cultural artifact. Written by first-wave feminist and suffrage leader Flora MacDonald (Merrill) Denison (1867-1921), this book bears witness to a transformative period in Canada´s social, literary and religious history.

Based on the life of Denison´s older sister, Mary Melville is the story of an alternative New Woman figure, a gifted young scholar with psychical abilities from small-town Ontario, whose promising life is cut short by a world not yet ready for her message or her powers. Surprisingly modern in its blending of fiction and non-fiction, Denison´s turn-of-the-century portrayal of Mary Melville as a strong young woman endowed with special psychic powers charted a new course in the representation of the New Woman figure in Canadian literature.

Although lost to literary obscurity shortly after its first publication, this new edition of Mary Melville, The Psychic sharpens the book´s twinned spiritualist-feminist themes through a lengthy critical introduction, explanatory notes, as well as reviews of the first edition and several appendices to contextualize the impact and influence of spiritualism on Victorian Canada.