The Manningtree Witches
A Novel
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Wolf Hall meets The Favourite in this beguiling debut novel that brilliantly brings to life the residents of a small English town in the grip of the seventeenth-century witch trials and the young woman tasked with saving them all from themselves.
"This is an intimate portrait of a clever if unworldly heroine who slides from amused observation of the 'moribund carnival atmosphere' in the household of a 'possessed' child to nervous uncertainty about the part in the proceedings played by her adored tutor to utter despair as a wagon carts her off to prison." —Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review
England, 1643. Puritanical fervor has gripped the nation. And in Manningtree, a town depleted of men since the wars began, the hot terror of damnation burns in the hearts of women left to their own devices.
Rebecca West, fatherless and husbandless, chafes against the drudgery of her days, livened only occasionally by her infatuation with the handsome young clerk John Edes. But then a newcomer, who identifies himself as the Witchfinder General, arrives. A mysterious, pious figure dressed from head to toe in black, Matthew Hopkins takes over the Thorn Inn and begins to ask questions about what the women on the margins of this diminished community are up to. Dangerous rumors of covens, pacts, and bodily wants have begun to hang over women like Rebecca—and the future is as frightening as it is thrilling.
Brimming with contemporary energy and resonance, The Manningtree Witches plunges its readers into the fever and menace of the English witch trials, where suspicion, mistrust, and betrayal run amok as a nation's arrogant male institutions start to realize that the very people they've suppressed for so long may be about to rise up and claim their freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The inventive, sharp-witted debut from poet Blakemore (Humbert Summer) draws on the Puritan witch trials of Civil War England, when several women were executed for witchcraft in 1645 Manningtree. The book opens with 19-year-old Rebecca West's tour-de-force description of her heavily snoring mother, the vulgar but undeniably formidable Beldam (a name, Rebecca notes, that "suits her, because it sounds wide and wicked"). Claustrophobic Manningtree is abuzz with the arrival of Matthew Hopkins, a mysterious, moneyed gentleman from Suffolk who later becomes the self-styled "Witchfinder General." In lust with clerk John Edes, Rebecca barely notices Hopkins, but then a local boy becomes inexplicably ill, and the cause is determined to be "bewitchment," with Rebecca's mother fingered as a guilty party. The collective obsession with Satan begins to manifest in strange ways for Rebecca, permeating her dreams and waking life with explicitly sexual imagery as things progress with John and she herself comes under suspicion of witchcraft. While Blakemore's commitment to historical verisimilitude may have kept this from reaching greater imaginative heights (chapters are prefaced by excerpts from the primary source documents to which they correspond), the author is a devastatingly good prose stylist. On the whole, Blakemore's ambitious and fresh take on the era will delight readers.
