Mary Anne Atwood and Her First Readers

Abstract This chapter shows how the earliest readers of the Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery perceived its mystical bent and distinguished it from other interpretations of alchemy that denied its laboratory operations. Initially, Mary Anne South closely managed the circulation of the few remaining copies of her work. After she was widowed as Mrs Atwood in 1885, she became more forthcoming and shared exemplars with several London-based occultists, most of them associated with the Theosophical Society. Early readers such as Arthur Edward Waite and Patience Sinnett esteemed the Suggestive Inquiry more highly than the moral interpretation of alchemy proposed by Ethan Allen Hitchcock in the United States and other alternatives. Isabelle de Steiger became Atwood’s closest friend and guardian of her intellectual legacy. To her dying day, Atwood herself insisted on the importance of the spiritual alchemy of rebirth.