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  • Published: 31 December 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448139439
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464
Categories:

Why Mrs Blake Cried

William Blake and the Erotic Imagination



A fascinating and new look at the hitherto unknown secret sexual practises of William Blake.

Much has been written about the work of William Blake and some of the religious beliefs that influenced him, but there is a secret history which, until now, has been kept deep beneath the surface in the mystical underground of England in the eighteenth-century. Here, leading Blake scholar Marsha Keith Schuchard reveals an altogether more intriguing and controversial picture of the poet and artist.

The discovery of Blake family documents took Schuchard on a journey of detection that led her to a cast of radical characters including Cagliostro, Zinzendorf and the mystic Swedenborg, and to a world of waking visions, sexual-spiritual experimentation, kabbalistic magic, tantric sex and free love.

Why Mrs Blake Cried offers a new insight into the work of Blake and takes us on an extraordinary journey through secret societies and ancient rituals.

  • Published: 31 December 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448139439
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464
Categories:

About the author

Marsha Keith Schuchard

Marsha Keith Schuchard, Ph. D has published extensively on eighteenth-century Cabalistic and "illuminist" Freemasonry and its influence on Swift, Ramsay, Swedenborg, and Blake. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Praise for Why Mrs Blake Cried

Fans of biographical minutiae will find it invaluable, and the closing insights into the refusal of Blake's libido to synchronise with his fading physicality are deeply moving.

Niall Griffiths, Telegraph

This remarkable book opens the reader's eyes to what fired Blake's writings and art

Independent

This fascinating book reconfigures the way we see the 18th century...Schuchard's book brings a fascinating new light to bear on Blake's work

Philip Hoare, Sunday Telegraph

Exposes a forgotten visionary/sexual underworld. Scholarship with the momentum of a detective story

Helen Simpson, Guardian

Schuchard reveals a weird esoteric, erotic and apocalyptic counterculture, brewing in what we otherwise consider the "enlightened" 18th century.

Gary Lachman, Independent on Sunday

Marsha Schuchard has found that grail of researchers - original documents that confirm suspicions about her subject... A fantastic miscellany of sex and mysticism.

Jad Adams, Guardian