From Houdini to Jean Dixon to popular TV programs such as Joan of Arcadia and Medium, the public has always been fascinated by prophets, psychics and seers. The members of the Community Club of Garden City - Hempstead are in for a fascinating afternoon on Wednesday, April 20 at 1:30 p.m. at the GC Casino. A haunting account of the birth of spiritualism and the Victorian era will be related by Nancy Rubin Stuart. She will discuss her new book, The Reluctant Spiritualist, the first authoritative biography of Maggie Fox, a world famous medium who helped originate the Spiritualism movement that swept America and Europe in the mid-19th century and who just as spectacularly debunked it in a startling confession forty years later.

Young Maggie was a beautiful Victorian teen-ager caught in a family web of greed and deception who rose to celebrity status because of her alleged ability to communicate with spirits. Her first seances in 1848 astounded the press and made her the darling of Broadway and fascinated the most prominent men and women of her era - among them Horace Greeley, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Todd Lincoln and Nathaniel Hawthorne. After a passionate love affair and secret marriage, her life took a surprising turn culminating with her shocking confession at the New York Academy of Music in 1888. A slide lecture will accompany Ms. Rubin-Stuarts talk. This will be Ms. Rubin-Stuart's second appearance at The Community Club. On those occasions, she discussed her biographies of Marjorie Merriweather Post and Isabella of Castile. She has also written and produced television documentaries for the Home and Garden Network and for the A + E network's America Castles series. In 1992, she was named Author of the Year by the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Members are cordially invited to meet the author after her presentation.

For information about membership in the Community Club, please call the club office on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at 746-0488.

Nancy Rubin Stuart