A vivid retelling…From the first farcical accusation to the novel’s tragic denouement, the plot unfolds with the unrelenting pace of a psychological thriller. For the reader, Alice’s innocence is never in question, but the novel ably portrays the web of misogyny, fear and religious convictions that made her guilt seem credible at the time. A treacle-thick atmosphere of moral anxiety suffuses the novel…Dawson lets the descriptions of this intensely physical world evoke its equally intense psychological landscape.
And from Rebecca Abrams…
In the course of the witch hunts that engulfed Europe in the 16th and 17th century, more than 50,000 people lost their lives, the vast majority of whom were post-menopausal women. In Witch Craze (2004), her magisterial study of hundreds of German witch trials, historian Lyndal Roper insists: “We cannot understand why witches were hunted unless we take the fears of those who hunted witches seriously. We must enter the nightmare world of those who believed in witchcraft and of those who found themselves accused.”
Author Jill Dawson takes on the challenge of such understanding with her latest novel, The Bewitching, a vivid retelling of the true story of Alice Samuel, who was accused and found guilty of bewitching the five young daughters of local squire Robert Throckmorton in the village of Warboys in Cambridgeshire at the end of the 16th century.
Most of the novel’s narration is given to Martha, the Throckmortons’ faithful servant, who watches with mounting anxiety as the children fall prey to sudden unaccountable fits and visions. When one daughter after another names their neighbour Alice, a sharp-tongued misfit, as the source of their afflictions, the inescapable net of suspicion is cast.
As rumours swirl around the servants’ quarters, lurid accounts of demonic possession leech into the nursery, further nourishing the children’s febrile imaginations. Before long a trio of theologians from Cambridge university has descended on the household, eager to apply the demonologist’s handbook, the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches, 1486, by Heinrich Kramer), to real life.
From the first farcical accusation to the novel’s tragic denouement, the plot unfolds with the unrelenting pace of a psychological thriller Martha is plagued by doubts about the cause of the children’s attacks but takes refuge in silence, keenly aware, as an unmarried woman in her thirties and of unknown parentage, that her position in the social order of Warboys is also precarious. “The life of a servant is one of hidden traps,” she reflects, “like the ones left in the woods for coneys.”
A treacle-thick atmosphere of moral anxiety suffuses the novel. For the female characters, every passing thought and action must be policed for signs of “naughtiness”. When Bessie Throckmorton is gripped by menstrual cramps for the first time, she is convinced she’s possessed by demons. Even her own mother struggles to find words to explain to the terrified girl that what she’s experiencing is normal and natural.
Hovering over the novel is the spectre of sexual predation from which no female is safe. For the men scrutinising the Throckmorton girls and closing in on poor Alice and her 19-year-old daughter Nessie, the “mysteries” of the female body are a constant source of prurient fascination and eroticised dread.
Martha senses that her master’s “great terror” of Alice Samuel has nothing to do with imps or toads, but even once she has acknowledged her own suppressed memory of Robert Throckmorton as “someone lewd and incapable of restraint”, she shrinks from following this knowledge to its taboo conclusion.
In a culture saturated with anxiety and secrecy about female sexuality and fertility, male power is paramount. Neither Martha, nor her mistress, nor the girls she has helped raise since infancy, and least of all Alice and Nessie Samuel, have any real agency; all are equally confined by their gender and the ways it is perceived.
Within these constraints, the potent allure of being an accuser starts to make tragic sense. So too the near-impossibility of resisting the collective view of those accused. Even the idea of resistance is terrifying, as Martha, caught between knowing and not-knowing, admits to herself in a fleeting vision of velvet purses “gathered, puckered, with the stitches now unravelling, opening their mouths, and then all the wild, ungodly things, bats, moths, devils, words, flying out”.
If the novel feels a little didactic in places, for the most part Dawson lets the descriptions of this intensely physical world evoke its equally intense psychological landscape. Folklore and herbal cures, brewing and baking, and the unceasing women’s work of caring for the young and the sick unite and disunite the community of Warboys.
From a modern perspective, a perplexing feature of historic accounts of witchcraft trials is not so much why accused women confessed to their alleged crimes, but why they did so in such extravagant detail. Dawson does not shy away from this puzzle and her depiction of Alice Samuel’s trial, drawn from contemporary accounts, is as plausible as it is harrowing.
The paranoia, envy, tribalism and misogyny that drove the atrocities of historic witch trials find expression today in online trolling, victim-shaming and virulent conspiracy theories. The last legal execution for witchcraft in Britain took place in 1727. Witch hunts, however, are with us still.
ORDER FROM AMAZON HERE
ORDER FROM TOPPINGS HERE
ORDER FROM FOYLES HERE
ORDER FROM WATERSTONES HERE
ORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG.UK HERE
ORDER FROM BLACKWELLS HERE