Rosemary Brown (1916Brown ( -2001 is certainly a highly unusual case in music history. In the 1960s, she started to notate hundreds of musical pieces that she attributed to the spirits of several great concert music composers with whom she claimed to be in touch as a spirit medium. Brown also furnishes a promising persona case study. In order to convince the public that her music had a spiritual origin, she described herself (and was described) as a simple housewife and mother with no profound musical knowledge, therefore hardly capable of writing original musical pieces in the styles of acclaimed composers. The purpose of this paper is first, to provide an examination of Rosemary Brown's public persona; second, to relate it to the spiritualist tradition, in order to demonstrate that the constituent elements of Rosemary Brown's persona were available in the spiritualist cultural repertoire; and third, to relate this same persona to the implications of gender in the understanding of mediumship among spiritualists.

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