Photograph: FlixPix/Alamy
From a feminist retelling of Pride and Prejudice, featuring Lydia Bennet as a witch, to a history of landmark trials and a host of magical wellness titles, 2023 is the year in which witch books will truly cast their spell. No longer a niche market, the titles coming out range from historical fiction to fantasy to self-help. Witches have permeated every corner of the publishing world, as well as our TV screens, with the Netflix Addams Family spin-off hit Wednesday, and a TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy on the way.
So why the fascination now? Witch-hunts raged across Europe and colonial America for more than 400 years, from the 14th to the 18th century, killing thousands, mostly women. Yet while witches have inspired books, films and works of art over the centuries, the literary outpouring has increased noticeably in recent years. From Stacey Halls’ 2019 bestseller The Familiars, to The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, The Manningtree Witches by AK Blakemore and the bumper crop coming this year: Kirsty Logan’s Now She Is Witch, Emilia Hart’s generational tale of female resilience Weyward, Melinda’s Taub’s The Shocking Confessions of Miss Lydia Bennet, Witch, and my own novel, The Witches of Vardø, about the Finnmark witch trials in 1662, to name just a few.
“There is a new wave of feminism that looks back to women’s rights across history and recognises the echo of these injustices,” says CJ Cooke, author of The Lighthouse Witches. As women’s rights are tested around the world, from the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US to the suppression of the revolutionary movement in Iran, writing about historical injustices such as witch trials provides a linking thread between the past and present. “The push for women’s rights must look back as well as forward.”
Marion Gibson’s forthcoming Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials examines witch-hunts from Salem to the lesser-known Finnmark witch trials, as well as how the word “witch” has re-entered political language today. “I think books on witch trials are popular now because we’ve slipped back recently from some of the progress we took for granted, on human rights and rational democracy,” she says.
Gibson explores how witch-hunts have long been bound up in issues not just of gender and sexuality, but class, race, colonialism and nationalism. In her chapter on the Finnmark witch trials in the far north of Norway, Gibson attributes the ferocity of the persecution to the Danish rulers’ colonisation of the indigenous Sámi people. It was a widespread belief among 17th-century Christians that evil resided in the far north. Surely the Sámi with their shaman (noaidi) who played a ceremonial drum (runebomme) and sang songs (joiking) were in league with Satan? The Sámi also possessed an understanding of the natural world, and the ability to thrive in the harsh Arctic environment, much to the envy of their colonisers. This kinship with nature has long been associated with those accused of witchcraft and is an important theme in the books being published now.
“We are in a moment when the domination of both women and nature shows its limits and is increasingly questioned and challenged,” says Mona Chollet, author of In Defence of Witches: Why Women are Still on Trial, a powerful discourse on the treatment of women since the witch trials and their impact on modern-day society.
Fear was what fuelled the witch-hunts of the past, and is what fuels the prejudices of the present. In the trial testimonies at Finnmark, those accused of witchcraft were viewed as agents of destruction. In truth, they were caught in the conflict between their fishermen husbands and the Bergen merchants over debts for grain due to low fishing yields. They became scapegoats for economic hardship and were accused of crimes such as chasing the fish away or raising storms to destroy the merchants’ ships. They were also accused of having sex with the devil, and of selling their own daughters to him. Searching for the “devil’s mark”, a common method of proof of witchcraft all over Europe, involved stripping the accused woman naked and examining her most private areas. Witch trials were misogyny in its most foul form, with unmistakable sexual undertones, so it’s no coincidence that the growing interest in books on witch-hunts coincides with the #Metoo movement.
However, there is a counter-narrative seeking to redress the perception of witches as victims, as evidenced in Kirsty Logan’s novel Now She Is Witch, out this week. “I wanted to ask: why do they have to be wholly innocent or wholly evil?” Logan says. “Witches show us that the world is more complicated (and indeed more beautiful) than a simple binary; more than good/evil, black/white, innocent/criminal, healer/poisoner.”
“There’s something empowering about female characters who use a divine feminine strength to break free from patriarchal structures,” says Juno Dawson, author of the bestselling urban fantasy novel Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, about an alternate England with a secret government bureau of witches, and its sequel, The Shadow Cabinet, published in June. These books question, she argues, “the inherent misogyny underpinning our society that automatically labels anything feminine as ranging from weak to repulsive”.
This is why why witch books speak to the rebel in each of us, and cultivate a sense of community among their readership: we feel the echoes from the past. Once we were witches, and we are here to stay.
• The Witches of Vardø by Anya Bergman is published by Manilla Press. Bergman will be in discussion with Seraphina Madsen and AK Blakemoreat Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London WC2H at 7pm on Thursday 19 January
