Daphne Vigers

Daphne Vigers (fl. 1940s-1960s)

The 1944 Andrew Dakers edition

Daphne Vigers published only two editions of one book, Atlantis Rising (London: Andrew Dakers, 1944; second edition London: Aquarian Press, 1952). The dust-wrapper to the reprint gives what little biographical information is known about the author, noting that as a young woman in her twenties she “went though a series of extraordinary experiences in which she witnessed the scenes of a long vanished land”. Her quasi-novel tells of the earthly paradise of Atlantis, and of the “final cataclysm in which the whole land sank beneath the Atlantic Ocean”.  The book describes Vigers’s visits, by psychic projection, to ancient Atlantis, and also to the future when Atlantis will have risen again above the waves.  Vigers declares that the British race is descended from the noble Atlanteans who did not fall victim to the black magic of renegade priests. In all, though presented as a novel, this book is more of an occult tract.

The 1952 Aquarian Press edition

Vigers apparently wrote at least two other unpublished works. Bernard Miall (1876-1953) served as publisher’s reader in late 1941 for an earlier novel, City of Terrible Nights, about the blitzkrieg of London.  He called it “an artless, spontaneous, unaffected novel, with occasional paragraphs or pages of comment, shrewd or commonplace, but apparently individual.” Another book was Wingless Flight, for which John Gordon Hargrave (1894-1982) completed twenty-two drawings, under the pseudonym “Thot”, intended to be published with the book.  Their captions indicate the visionary nature of the text, which apparently no longer survives.

 Vigers was listed as living in southwest London from 1947 thorough 1965, after which time she disappears from the public record.