Mabel Collins

Mabel Collins was born in Guernsey on 9th September 1851. She became a journalist and novelist. She became a friend and supporter of Helena Petrowna Blavatsky and joined with Annie Besant to found the Theosophical Society.

Books by Collins include Light on the Path (1885), The Blossom and the Fruit (1888), The Idyll of the White Lotus (1890), Morial the Mahatma (1892), Suggestion (1892), The Star Sapphire (1896) and The Story of Sensa (1913).

During the First World War she wrote a book entitled The Crucible (1915). This helped to promote strange happenings on the Western Front. She quoted one young officer as saying: "I had the most amazing hallucinations marching at night, so I was fast asleep, I think. Everyone was reeling about the road and seeing things.... I saw all sorts of things, enormous men walking towards me and lights and chairs and things in the road."

Her biographer, Kim Farnell, has argued: "She wrote a number of articles, some of which were to form the basis for her books and was also a fashion correspondent for The World, writing a regular column. Most of Mabel's novels are romantic sensation fiction. In later years her experiences in the occult and theosophy were used as a basis for her fiction writing.... Mabel Collins was an instrumental figure in early theosophy but owing to the disputes she was involved in she has more or less disappeared from the history books. She was an author, a medium, a theosophist, the lover of Jack the Ripper, a fashion writer, an anti vivisection campaigner...the list is a lot longer than that of most people’s achievements."

Mabel Collins died on 31st March 1927.