Exploring "the idea of femininity as a social construct", she initially planned to focus her thesis on the manner in which Victorian medical science played in reinforcing "a feminine norm", but in doing so came upon the case of Louisa Lowe, a woman who appeared in front of the Parliamentary Select Committee in 1887, claiming that she had been wrongly incarcerated in a mental asylum by her husband because she was a Spiritualist.

Fascinated by the relationship between this Spiritualist movement and women in Late Victorian England, she decided to refocus her doctorate on this topic instead.

[3] Owen took as her primary source material the published tracts, personal accounts and newsletters of the Late Victorian Spiritualist movement, noting that W.H.

Harrison's Spiritualist and James Burns' Human Nature and Medium Daybreak proved to be "the most useful, enlightening and engaging.

Birch noted that by the 1980s, Spiritualism had been "bundled out of sight, like a batty old aunt at a family gathering", ignoring the importance that it had held in Victorian society.