The London Séance Society: A Novel

Vaudeline D’Allaire is a secondary character and love interest for Lenna Wickes. As an accomplished medium who uses her skills to solve mysterious deaths, Vaudeline serves as a mentor to both Evie and Lenna at different points in time. She also serves as a foil for Lenna, for she candidly embraces her own sexuality, and her experience far exceeds Lenna’s less-examined, more insular romantic experiences with other women. Vaudeline has lived abroad in Europe and has taken many lovers, men and women both. She is very open with Lenna about her sexual experiences, including her experiences with lovers after their deaths.

Vaudeline’s actions drive much of the plot’s progression through the opening sections of the novel. She is the one who decides to go to London to investigate Volckman’s murder, and she also insists on visiting the women connected to Volckman’s death, whom Morely and Beck would have ignored outright. Similarly, she devises the plan to incapacitate Morely in the library by using her own sexual charisma. As is common in mentor-student narratives, however, Vaudeline takes a back seat during the novel’s climactic events, and Lenna becomes the more active party. In the climactic séance, Lenna finally employs all of the skills that Vaudeline has taught her, and in the final séance in which Morely’s ghost is forever imprisoned, Lenna leads the proceedings while Vaudeline watches. Vaudeline therefore acts as the consummate guide, offering Lenna a template for how she might pursue her true romantic desires with authenticity despite the limitations of Victorian society, and she also allows her protégé the agency to grow into the woman and medium she is destined to become.

Mr. Morely is the novel’s primary antagonist. Sarah Penner immediately establishes him as an unreliable narrator, for although his private narration reveals much to the readers, he often chooses to conceal many truths from Lenna and Vaudeline in order to protect his own interests. Morely begins the novel as a pitiable character who suffers from deep self-loathing because of a red birthmark that covers much of his face. Morely feels that this facial feature has been the reason for much of his isolation from polite society, especially from the company of women. Lenna’s sister Evie takes full advantage of his social isolation and attraction for her by feigning romantic and sexual interest in him and establishing a quid pro quo relationship to gain access to the Society. However, as this arrangement continues, it takes on increasingly sinister undertones.

Over the course of the narrative, Morely is slowly revealed to be nothing more than a misogynistic con artist. He is motivated entirely by financial gain and understands how to use the institution he works for to aid him in exploiting vulnerable people—in this case, grieving women—for their money. Throughout his interactions with Evie, he only values her as a source of sex and does not see her as an independent person in her own right. Although his interactions with her are initially portrayed to be tender, he quickly moves to having sex with her on a transactional basis, and he also employs her in a scheme to save the Society’s tattered reputation. When he discovers that Evie is actually working against his financial interests, she becomes disposable to him. This occurrence reveals his true attitude toward women, which is also reflected by the gradual shifts in his diction. By the novel’s end, he routinely characterizes women as “rats” and “vermin,” seeing them as non-human creatures that should be destroyed. However, he finally gets his comeuppance when his plans to destroy Lenna and Vaudeline ultimately result in his own death.