"[4][note 1] Washington wrote that Blavatsky with Sinnett and his wife Patience has been in sincere friendship, and over a decade (1879–89), she led with them the correspondence and has supplied to the author the materials for her biography.

[6][note 2] The book was "an attempt to reestablish" Blavatsky's reputation after the attacks of the Society for Psychical Research contained in Hodgson Report.

To enhance the impact of her words the governess added that "even the old man she had found so ugly, and had laughed at so much, calling him 'a plume-less raven' — that even he would decline her for a wife!

"[22] Helena's aunt has described: "At the altar, she heard the priest saying to her: 'Thou shalt honour and obey thy husband', and at this hated word 'shalt,' her young face — for she was hardly seventeen — was seen to flush angrily, then to become deadly pale.

"[24][25] Next Blavatsky (Hahn) has left Russia and voyaged "ten long years in strange and out-of-the-way places — in Central Asia, India, South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.

"[26] Blavatsky's unusual psychic abilities, that had manifested even in her childhood and adolescence, during her travel significantly increased and determined, and she returned to Russia, having many occult powers.

She said to him that "she often saw, to her disgust, how her own recollections and brain-images were drawn from her memory and disfigured in the confused amalgamation that took place between their reflection in the medium's brain, which instantly sent them out, and the shells which sucked them in like a sponge and objectivised them.

"[41] Next Sinnett transmits the following words by Blavatsky: "Even the materialized form of my uncle at the Eddys was the picture; it was I who sent it out from my own mind, as I had come out to make experiments without telling it to anyone.

In connection with her mediumship, Sinnett argues that "there, where a less strong nature would have been surely wrecked in the struggle, her indomitable will found somehow or other the means of subjecting the world of the invisibles — to the denizens of which she has ever refused the name of 'spirits' and souls — to her own control.

"[47] Solovyov also stated that the theosophical "Universal Brotherhood" is only a "funny bunch of systematic deceptions, as say the modern Frenchmen – rien qu'une fumisterie."

He wrote that the conclusions of the SPR about "Blavatsky's phenomena make superfluous the assumption that, in addition to the tricks, she could to demonstrate for the benefit of the theosophy some really exceptional psychic abilities.

Madame Coulomb asserts that they were actually so produced, by the use of a small musical-box, constructed on the same principle as the machine employed in connection with the trick known under the name 'Is your watch a repeater?'

and she produced garments which she asserted had belonged to Madame Blavatsky, and showed me stains resembling iron-mould on the right side, slightly above the waist, which she affirmed had been caused by contact with the metal of the machine.