The Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt

I'm not exactly sure why I decided to read this one. I actually requested it in from another library... maybe I saw it cross my desk and thought it looked interested. Anyway, I read it and there you go!

So this book is set in the 1600's in England and is actually based on a true story (which I didn't realize until I read the author's note at the end of the book). The story spans a fairly large amount of time, beginning with Elizabeth (Bess, AKA Demdike) telling of her younger life and ending with her granddaughter, Alizon, telling the end of the story. Each of these two narrators has their own "voice", and the grandmother has an especially heavy dialect that is a bit hard to get used to.

Given the fact that I have some interest in the Tudor and Stuart eras in England, this book was a great find for that historical setting. The story starts during the short reign of Henry VIII's son Edward VI, then the also short reign of Mary I, into Elizabeth I and ending up with James I. The key to all of these monarch changes in this story is the religious changes. Our main characters are Catholics (or popists, as they called them) and they felt the results of the Protestant changes that came about after Henry VIII. It is a documented fact that those who continued the Catholic practices in England during those days were persecuted. Priests were tortured to death and their heads placed on spikes... and the horrors went on from there. Obviously, from the title, this story deals with witchcraft... or at least those who were accused of witchcraft. Did differing beliefs and practices of old lead to these accusations? An interesting question. One reviewer quoted on the back cover of the book talks of the fine line between good and evil... and I really think this book leaves so much of these questions up to the interpretation of the reader.

I have read all of Philippa Gregory's Tudor series (The Other Boleyn Girl, etc), which are stories of the royalty or at least the gentry during this era. This book looks at a completely different group of Englanders... the utterly poor and destitute. Old Demdike actually has a permit for begging... she and her family go from house to house, offering to do small chores in exchange for the most basic of things: a piece of fabric, a loaf of bread, etc. For me, this stark juxtaposition was a learning experience in itself. Now, of course, we can't really know for sure what life was like for these poor folks back in the 17th Century, especially given that the poor were obviously illiterate. But the picture that is created by Sharratt here is a believable and shocking one. Definitely leads one to be grateful for all of the comforts that 21st century life affords us!

It took me a while to get into this book. I was disappointed that the jacket description mentioned an event that didn't happen until about 2/3 of the way into the book. And truly, that was where the main action of the book really started. So you can see why I had a hard time getting into it. I didn't hate it... but I did find myself wishing for it to hurry up and get on with itself. It usually doesn't take me almost two weeks to get through a book, especially one with relatively few pages (about 330). But yet I found so much of the story quite fascinating... and I might have been even more fascinated if I had known that it was based on a true story with all of the characters being actual people. But the author had her reasons for saving that revelation for the end of the story (which is why I'm not going into too many details here). Maybe a Dan Brown-esque intro page stating simply that "all of the characters in this story actually lived and such-and-such events have been documented" would have been nice. Anyway, it is worth the read, even if just for the historical points of interest.