https://www.reddit.com/r/modernart/comments/u1y3xf/madge_gill_untitled_outsider_art_1940/

The high days of spiritualism were an interesting time for modernity. It was a rough world to live shortly in. We didn't yet have scientific understandings of psychology and psychiatry to cope with things like high infant and child mortality rates, more widespread domestic enslavement of women along with the demands of Victorian/Edwardian social propriety, there weren't labour rights or proper unions if they did manage to gather enough independence to chase self-actualisation.

Especially in the aftermath of grief, the treatment gap was filled with spiritualist mediums who claimed to be able to communicate with the dead. What we now consider party games for children and magic tricks were taken seriously by people who could choose between that and an old-timey asylum for dealing with the trauma of their children dying. It was a role analogous to what modern chiropractors do for the new age that replaced the spiritualist age without losing its ontological framework.

Madge Gill is an example of one of the people on the receiving end of spiritualism. From her wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madge_Gill

Born 19 January 1882, an illegitimate child in East Ham, Essex, (now Greater London), she spent much of her early years in seclusion because her family couldn't stand the embarrassment. At age 9, despite her mother still being alive, she was placed in Dr. Barnardo’s Girls’ Village Home orphanage at Barkingside, Ilford, Essex.[1]

In 1896, she was sent to Canada by Dr. Barnardo's Homes as a British Home Child, arriving aboard the S.S. Scotsman as one of a group of 254 children destined to become farm laborers and domestic servants for Canadian families.[3] Upon arrival at Quebec City, she and the other girls in her travel party were taken by train to Barnardo’s Hazelbrae Home in Peterborough, Ontario before being sent out on placements as domestics.[4] Her name, Maud Eades, can be found inscribed on the “Additions and Corrections” side panel installed on the Hazelbrae Barnardo Home Memorial in Peterborough in 2019.[5] After spending her teenage years working as a domestic servant and caregiver for young children on a series of Ontario farms, she managed to move back to East Ham in 1900 to live with her aunt, who introduced her to Spiritualism and astrology.[1][6] During that time, she found work as a nurse at Whipps Cross Hospital, in Leytonstone.

At the age of 25, she married her cousin, Thomas Edwin Gill, a stockbroker. Together they had three sons; their second son Reginald, died of the Spanish flu. The following year she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl and almost died herself, contracting a serious illness that left her bedridden for several months and blind in her left eye

Even by the atrocious living standards of the day that's a bad hand to be dealt. Considering herself to be a vessel for spiritual communication in the aftermath of it, while living as a housewife soon due for the asylum, she began manically drawing scenes like this. Also from her wikipedia article:

During her illness, in 1920, Gill – now thirty-eight – took a sudden and passionate interest in drawing, creating thousands of allegedly mediumistic works over the following 40 years, most done with ink in black and white. The works came in all sizes, from postcard-sized to huge sheets of fabric, some over 30 feet (9.1 m) long. She claimed to be guided by a spirit she called "Myrninerest" (my inner rest) and often signed her works in this name. As American scholar Daniel Wojcik noted, "like other Spiritualists, Gill did not attribute her art to her own abilities, but considered herself to be a physical vessel through which the spirit world could be expressed."[7] However, she experimented with a wide variety of media including knitting, writing, weaving, and crochet work.[8] Extremely prolific, she was capable of completing dozens of drawings in a single night. The figure of a young woman in intricate dress appeared thousands of times in her work and is often thought to be a representation of herself or her lost daughter, and in general female subjects dominate her work. Her drawings are characterised by geometric chequered patterns and organic ornamentation, with the blank staring eyes of female faces and their flowing clothing interweaving into the surrounding complex patterns.

And from: https://www.messynessychic.com/2020/01/28/meet-mrs-madge-gill-the-outsider-artist-who-painted-through-the-spirit-world/

“Mediumistic Art.” It’s something we’d never heard of, until we uncovered the mysterious world of Mrs. Madge Gill. One of history’s most important outsider artists, Madge tended to her garden, her husband, and her children in what appeared to be the quiet life of a London housewife. But one day, she felt a stirring to create, and in the darkest hours of the night, she began to draw – and she wasn’t alone. Madge declared her artistic partnership with an otherworldly companion, a spirit called “Myrninerest,” as the guiding, ghostly of creative bouts. Together, they made an elaborate tapestry of thousands of works, from embroidered pieces to tapestries, gothic, architectural drawings to a kind of alphabet. History has labeled her art as “obsessive”and “giddy”; “ghostlike,” and existing in familiar, kaleidoscopic spaces.

This relationship with a ghost would later compel her to stop making art after another death of a child.