Geraldine Cummins

Geraldine Cummins
Geraldine Cummins as a young woman, c.1915
Born	Geraldine Dorothy Cummins (1890-01-24)24 January 1890 Cork, Ireland
Died	24 August 1969(1969-08-24) (aged 79)
Nationality	Irish
Occupation	writer
Known for	mediumship

Geraldine Dorothy Cummins (1890–1969) was an Irish spiritualist medium, novelist and playwright. She began her career as a creative writer, but increasingly concentrated on mediumship and "channelled" writings, mostly about the lives of Jesus and Saint Paul, though she also published on a range of other topics.

Her novels and plays typically documented Irish life in a naturalist manner, often exploring the pathos of everyday life.

She was born Cork, Ireland, the daughter of the physician Ashley Cummins, professor of medicine at the National University of Ireland. In her youth she was an athlete, becoming a member of the Irish Women's International Hockey Team. She was also active as a suffragette. Her desire to follow her father in a medical career was vetoed by her mother, so she began a literary career as a journalist and creative writer. From 1913 to 1917 she wrote three plays for the Abbey Theatre in collaboration with Suzanne R. Day, the most successful of which was the comedy Fox and Geese (1917). She published the novel The Land they Loved in 1919, a naturalistic study of working class Irish life.

As she concentrated on mediumship, her literary work tailed off. However, she continued to publish creative literature in her later years. Her solo-written play, Till Yesterday Comes Again was produced by the Chanticleer Theatre, London, in 1938. She also published another novel, Fires of Beltane (1936) and a short-story collection Variety Show (1959).

Literary critic Alexander G. Gonzalez says that her work tries to encompass the full range of Irish social life, from the aristocracy to the lower classes. In this respect she was influenced by Somerville and Ross. Gonzalez considers her short story "The Tragedy of Eight Pence" to be the "finest" of her writings, the tale of a "happily married woman trying to shield her ill husband from the knowledge that his death will leave her penniless."

She began to work as a medium following prompting from Hester Dowden and E. B. Gibbes. She received alleged messages from her spirit-guide "Astor" and was an exponent of automatic writing. Her books were based on these communications. In 1928 she published The Spirits of Cleophas, which provided channelled material on early Christian history complementing Acts of the Apostles and St. Paul's writings, supposed to have been communicated by the spirit of Cleophas, one of Paul's followers. This was later supplemented by Paul in Athens (1930) and The Great Days of Ephesus (1933).