The Manningtree Witches

"Yes, the witch hunt lasted over two years and started in Essex—in fact, it originated near Manningtree, where Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne were living at the time. When the Manningtree book was published, I was still writing my book, and initially it really took the wind out of my sails—to have the same witch hunt and very similar evidence covered in such a wonderful way. But I recommend it because it is a very powerful depiction of that period in English history. It’s based on real women and real events, but it’s told with an incredible contemporary energy. There are very compelling characters particularly in the person of Rebecca West, a real person. She and her mother Anne were among the very first victims that Hopkins and Stearne singled out. Anne West had form, I suppose. She’d been accused of being a witch several times in the past. So, an obvious target. But what The Manningtree Witches does is portray that mother-daughter relationship in such a beautiful and compelling way, showing how patriarchal institutions prise their closeness apart and contaminate their relationship. In the novel, one turns against the other: the daughter is persuaded to give evidence against her mother and some other women—which did happen in the witch hunts. Women would turn against one another, sometimes for religious reasons. Also, this was a time of extreme hardship. The Civil War was raging, food was very, very scarce because the army had requisitioned it all. Then, in East Anglia, there were a series of crop failures and storms. On the east coast, around Aldeburgh, the harbour got silted up after a particularly bad storm and that was the beginning of the end for the town’s herring fisheries. So it was a kind of perfect storm of circumstances that formed the backdrop to the witch hunt and set the stage for Hopkins and Stearne. The Manningtree Witches is a very beautiful, very vivid book, and it brings across very clearly the plight of these women—and what happens when women are persuaded to disbelieve themselves."

"And the poet A. K. Blakemore’s prose debut The Manningtree Witches has also been extremely warmly received. It’s a historical novel based on the real-life 17th century witch trials in Essex, England, set during the civil war and at a time when Puritan attitudes prevailed. The self-appointed ‘Witchfinder General’ Mathew Hopkins sets about rooting out practitioners of Maleficia, devilry, at a time when many women have been left to get on with life while their men were fighting wars. I’ve seen it described, rather deliciously, as ‘ Fleabag meets Hilary Mantel’, and if you can resist that then you are made of sterner stuff than I. Shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize; out in the US on August 10. Yes. Look out for Leone Ross’s magical realist This One Sky Day ; Gwendoline Riley’s tense tale of mother-daughter strife My Phantoms ; and Lucy Jago’s Jacobean scandal A Net for Small Fishes . And if you missed it last year, Louise Erdrich was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her 2020 novel The Night Watchman , which is set on an Indian reservation in 1950s America and inspired by the life of her own grandfather. The New York Times called it “a magisterial epic”. Part of our best books of 2021 series."

"If we’re talking Puritans and witch trials, one’s mind immediately zips to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible , but A.K. Blakemore’s fiction debut is, I feel, perhaps more spiritually in tune with Yorgos Lanthimos’s deranged period drama The Favourite, or perhaps Hilary Mantel’s dryly humorous Wolf Hall . It’s a darkly sardonic story based on the real-life witch craze that took place during the early years of the English Civil War, when a self-declared ‘Witchfinder General’ took it upon himself to root out malefaction, moral corruption and heresy among the women left behind by their soldier husbands, sons and neighbours. In real life, an estimated 200 women were executed for witchcraft during this period, and the trials dramatised in this book draw from contemporaneous accounts—although some characters and events have been altered. Nevertheless, Blakemore wears this research very lightly. The prose is deeply sensual and immersive; written in modern English but bejewelled with period-appropriate vocabulary. Blakemore is a published poet, and that comes through very strongly. Highly recommended."