Jill Dawson’s novels are often set in the Fens, often based on true stories and often written with a clear feminist purpose. And yet, they’re also astonishingly varied.
Her last book, The Language of Birds, for example, turned the nanny murdered by Lord Lucan in 1974 from a historical footnote into a warm and vivid human being (from the Fens). Now, in The Bewitching, another real-life case allows Dawson to plunge us deep into the strange, superstitious heart of East Anglia in Elizabethan times.
The novel opens with Alice, a woman of 49 years, being summoned to the local manor house where the Throckmorton family’s nine-year-old daughter Jane is having mysterious fits. As the village healer, Alice is willing to help—but once she starts to, Jane denounces her as a witch who’d caused the fits in the first place.
And from there, it’s pretty much downhill for poor Alice, whose other giveaway witchy characteristics include a strikingly pretty daughter and an unfortunate tendency to speak her mind, even to her social betters.
“Another real-life case allows Dawson to plunge us deep into the strange, superstitious heart of East Anglia”
Watching all this with a sharpness that would surprise the Throckmortons is their servant Martha, the narrator of much of the book. Martha doesn’t doubt the existence of witches—but in this case she does, somewhat nervously, wonder if everything is quite as it seems. And she is of course right to wonder. While the direct accusations of witchcraft come from Jane, and later her sisters, the supposed theological underpinning is supplied by a series of patriarchal men whose belief in female inferiority is absolute. Not that this rules out female desirability…
Only very occasionally does Martha’s perspective feel suspiciously modern. The rest of the time, she conjures up a wholly convincing picture of what it was like to live in a society with little understanding of medicine, where the supernatural was seen as perfectly natural. There’s also a cracking page-turner of a plot in which the (non-supernatural) revelations keep coming.
The result is one of those novels that thoroughly immerses you in a world that might now seem unimaginable—except that the author has imagined it so completely.
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