‘I actually hear you think of me’: Voices, Mediums and Deafness in the Writing of Rosa Praed.

Abstract

Scholarship on Rosa Praed continues to expand and generate interest in her writing and life, but her relationship with her deaf daughter Maud has not yet been canvassed. This paper seeks to reclaim the overlooked figure of Maud and to examine how Praed’s attitudes to sound and hearing manifested through the use of the grotesque in her novels, her interest in telepathy, and in her practice of listening to and communicating with the dead through writing and reading.