Getting Your Head Around Sarah Penner The London Seance Society
Sarah Penner The London Seance Society is a historical fiction novel that came out in 2024. It's Penner's follow-up to her earlier bestseller The Lost Explorer. The book weaves together two timelines: one set in contemporary Philadelphia and another in 1870s London, both connected through themes of spiritualism, mediumship, and the people who built communities around the séance phenomenon. If you're coming to this expecting something like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, it's worth noting that Penner's approach is more grounded. The mystical elements are treated as cultural history rather than actual magic. The dual timeline structure is clean enough that you won't get lost, but I've heard from readers who found the contemporary sections thinner than the Victorian ones. That's a fair critique.
The Core Premise and Why It Works
The London-based storyline follows a group of middle-class women in the 1870s who organize secret séances. Spiritualism was having a massive cultural moment in Victorian England, and Penner draws on real historical records about how these gatherings operated. The séance society functioned as both a social outlet and a subversive space where women could exercise agency in a society that strictly policed their behavior. That tension between the supernatural and the social is what drives the book forward. The contemporary timeline involves a woman in Philadelphia who discovers connections to those Victorian séance participants. The bridge between the two eras is the usual fiction device — a journal, an artifact, a genealogical mystery. It's predictable, sure, but Penner handles it competently enough that it doesn't feel forced.
How the Book Actually Reads in Practice
I read this cover-to-cover on a weekend, probably three hours total. The prose is functional. There aren't any sentences that made me stop and reread them, which is both the book's greatest strength and its biggest weakness. You'll finish it without a lot of emotional residue, which is exactly what some people want from a summer read and what others will find underwhelming. The research is solid. Penner clearly spent time in the archives on Victorian spiritualism. References to real figures like the Fox sisters, the Davenport brothers, and the broader mediumship craze are woven in without feeling like a textbook. If you know anything about the history of spiritualism in England, you'll spot the accuracy. If you don't, you'll just get a good sense of how these societies actually functioned — invitations sent by post, attendance fees, the distinction between rapping mediums and trances, the frequent scandals when mediums got caught faking.
Get the Full Details
Things Beginners Usually Miss
One thing that catches people off guard is how much of the book is actually about class dynamics disguised as supernatural mystery. The séance society isn't just a spooky hobby for its members. It's a way for women who don't have independent income or social power to create their own autonomous institutions. The medium at the center of the society holds real authority within those walls. Outside them, she's a woman in the 1870s with barely any options. That gap between her power inside and outside the séance room is the book's real subject, even though it never announces itself that way. Another detail people skip over: Penner uses the spiritualism movement as a proxy for how women's knowledge gets dismissed. When characters in the book are convinced they're experiencing something real, the narrative doesn't definitively confirm or deny it. That ambiguity is deliberate. It mirrors the historical record, where we still can't say whether any of these women genuinely believed they were communicating with the dead. The book is more interesting when you read it as a story about belief and its consequences rather than a ghost story.
Where It Falls Apart
The contemporary storyline is the weak point. The Victorian sections benefit from period detail and structural tension — you know these women are operating under legal and social conditions that could destroy them if discovered. The modern timeline lacks that pressure. Nothing real is at stake. The protagonist's personal crisis feels manufactured to generate plot movement rather than emerging naturally from the situation. The ending also ties things up a bit too neatly. Real historical gaps don't resolve themselves cleanly. If you're the type of reader who likes loose ends and moral ambiguity, this wrapping everything into a single revealed connection might feel dishonest to the source material. Penner made a choice to give it a satisfying conclusion, and that's fine for the genre. Just don't expect it to sit with you for days afterward.
Who Should Read This and Who Should Skip It
Read it if you liked the historical research in The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Dunant or the dual-timeline structure of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. Skip it if you want genuine horror, deep psychological complexity, or literary prose that demands attention. This is comfortable genre fiction dressed in historical costume.
Sarah Penner The London Seance Society download and availability
The book is widely available through major retailers, libraries, and audiobook platforms. The audiobook narration is competent if unspectacular. No particular edition is notably better or worse. If you're deciding between formats, the print edition is the standard recommendation simply because the dual timeline structure benefits from being able to flip back and track which thread you're in, though that's a minor convenience rather than a serious limitation of the audiobook.
