“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In 1931 in Saratoga Springs, New York, Jane’s father, Delmer Roberts (or Del) chose to exercise the probability that he would leave his wife Marie and their daughter Jane, who was not yet three years old. Marie’s mother, Mary Finn, called Minnie, lived with the family and often served as Jane’s nanny. Jane was a second child following her mother’s earlier miscarriage. Already Marie was showing signs of arthritis. Jane and I came to believe that it was hardly accidental that her mother quickly became bedridden—for life—following the departure of her husband. Minnie Finn was killed by a hit-and-run speeding motorist one icy winter day on her way to the corner store to buy the young girl some shredded wheat for supper—a tragedy that Marie never stopped blaming her daughter for. The two went on welfare. A series of housekeepers, of varying abilities and temperaments and staying powers, were provided for them over the early years. The young Jane spent almost two years in a Catholic orphanage for women while her mother was hospitalized. Some of the housekeepers had been—and some still were—prostitutes, Jane told me. They took care of Marie’s physical needs—tasks that in her later teens Jane would often take care of herself. With welfare’s help Marie set up a telephone answering service for local doctors that she ran from her bed. The two women’s Catholicism became even stricter: it was often bolstered by the head of the local church coming to Sunday dinner at the old two-family house at 92 Middle Avenue, in one of the lower-income sections of Saratoga Springs.

It wasn’t too long however before Jane, already writing rudimentary poetry, began to have creative conflicts with the doctrinaire priests. She told me how eventually one of the older priests burned certain “forbidden” books of hers in the backyard incinerator, including one she particularly admired: Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There were other conflicts also, that Jane didn’t reveal to her mother: certain persistent hints and requests as she began to mature, Jane told me more than once, for favors from a young priest that she intuitively rejected. She left the church when she was 19, despite Marie’s bitter objections.

Pardon me for using the phrase every so often, but as the years passed and after her two very brief stays in Elmira’s St. Joseph’s hospital, Jane finally came to be deeply skeptical of the value of conventional medical help. It hadn’t helped when it was offered. The connections involving her mother’s bedridden condition and her tempestuous temper, including her suicide attempts, both faked and real, troubles with a succession of housekeepers, the lack of a father, the almost two years she spent in a Catholic orphanage while Marie was hospitalized, the death of her beloved grandfather, the whole strained atmosphere within which the gifted and impressionable child was growing, as well as her conflicts with church dogma and personalities, had, all together, powerful effects indeed. Neighbors tried to help. One gifted Jane with a male dog—a Sheltie—from the city pound. Jane named that loving young creature Mischa, and he was to offer her great comfort for years, just as he did to me when later we met. And I learned that the symptoms were not only a possibility that was native within my wife, but were to become corrosively alive within her all of those years later. Jane took me to meet her mother in the old double house on Middle Avenue three times. The first time, Marie cursed me from her bed; the next two times she ignored me.