Daughters of the Witching Hill [Hardcover]

The best and most powerful book about the Pendle Witches I have ever read. Living just across the Lancashire Border I am familiar with the story of Chattox and Demdike and the history of the Pendle Witches. But this book has taken me to places I could never have imagined. I was very graphically and realistically drawn into their century, into the brooding landscape of Pendle Hill, into the lives and circumstances of those women, and I felt every one of their emotion and pain and anguish right to the bitter end.
If you only ever read one book about the Pendle Witches - let it be this one. You will not be disappointed.

I grew up almost in the shadow of Pendle Hill, so stories of the seventeenth-century witch-hunt are familiar and haunting. I remember pinching my mother's copy of Robert Neill's "Mist over Pendle" to read by torchlight under the bedclothes, and later finding Harrison Ainsworth's rather Gothic "Lancashire Witches" interesting but ultimately unsatisfactory.

There have been other novels and re-tellings of this extraordinary story and I was a little nervous on opening this latest one - would it be Burning Times propaganda or a reductionist view of the events? In fact, I enjoyed the book immensely and found it difficult to put down. Mary Sharratt shows us familiar events in a new light, telling the story in the voice of Bess Southerns (aka Demdike), the oldest and perhaps most interesting of all the characters. She brings Bess to vibrant, loving, occasionally challenging life, with an authentic voice.

I will confess that I once thought of writing this story myself, but was very young at the time and simply had no real understanding of that vanished world of the 17th century - so different from and yet so tantalisingly familiar to us. The issues of that time and place come vividly to life in the novel, well-researched and fascinating. Lancashire was seen as a hotbed of Catholicism and adherents of this "old religion" included many influential families. To many Protestants, Catholicism was dangerously superstitious and almost synonymous with paganism or witchcraft.

Mary Sharratt also deals with some of the more difficult ideas of the time - witch marks, familiar spirits and the like - with grace and never asks me to suspend disbelief further than I'm able to. She also highlights the shocking poverty and extreme hunger to which so many were now being driven; the lengths to which some people had to go just to secure a meal - particularly since many of the Protestants of the day, believing themselves already to be saved and bound for heaven, saw no point in almsgiving. That was for the bad old days when credulous Catholics attempted to redeem themselves from Purgatory or worse by charitable acts. For all the cruelty that Catholicism has committed through the ages, it was often a kinder religion for the poor.

This makes it sound as though the poor were sad, starving victims of the times, but the author doesn't fall into that trap, instead portraying our heroines as strong, likeable women who were prepared to do whatever was necessary to ensure their own survival and that of their families. You find yourself rooting for them all the way.

A great read on many levels - good historical fiction, excellent strong female characters and an ending that - despite the fact that I knew roughly what happened - had me close to tears. What more could I ask?

I will be looking out for more of Mary Sharratt's books.

Bess Southerns heals the sick and foretells the future, earning herself a reputation of a cunning woman with those living in Pendle Forest. Her craft is passed down through her family and she also teaches some to her friend.

Set in Lancashire, England, during the early 17th century (a time when the Catholic religion was banned and witch-hunts were a big thing) Daughters of the Witching Hill is a tale of how a family struggles through poverty. They survive largely due to Bess' craft until the day her granddaughter, Alizon, meets a peddler in the road who refuses to sell her some pins. Following Alizon'z harsh words, the peddler suffers a stroke which leads to her being accused of being a witch. The local magistrate is keen to make a name for himself as a witch finder and plays the family members and neighbours against each other until eventually thirteen people in total are arrested.

Although the start of this book seemed a little slow to me, it was well written and clearly well researched and historically accurate. The book is based on a true story but written from a first person point of view of two of the characters.

The second part of the book switches narration from Bess to Alizon and it was at this point where it seemed to pick up and started to capture me. Each of the characters are well written and even towards the end when it seemed inevitable what was going to happen to them, there was still a little part of me hoping that they would all live happily ever after. Although the end was pretty predictable, the book was more about the characters and in particular how they survived as a family, rather than where they ended up.

An enjoyable read, this book would be more suited to fans of historical fiction than those who like the fantasy element of witchcraft.