“Remembering a Faery Tradition” by Trudy Last: a new book by a local author

[icymist]

Trudy Last, an author living in a small town outside Boston, has just published Remembering a Faery Tradition: A Case of Wicca in Nineteenth-Century America. This book analyzes a collection of poetry about the Civil War and explores the possibility that the poems were actually about Wicca.

The collection of poetry, The Veteran’s Bride and Other Poems, was published by Alta Isadore Gould in 1894. Mrs. Gould was in fact Ms. Last’s great-grandmother. As a child, Ms. Last was shown the poems and accompanying drawings. As a graduate student, she wrote her master’s thesis about her great-grandmother’s book. “When I was a little girl, I’d heard things about it, and they were in my mind somewhere… I knew there were secrets in that book… There were things in there that I wasn’t seeing,” she describes.

When she started reading the poems as an adult and a student, “things started falling into place.” Ms. Last, who is not herself a Wiccan, began to see pagan symbolism in the poems and drawings, and began to suspect that her great-grandmother had been Wiccan.

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