THE WITCHFINDER'S SISTER by Beth Underdown. An interview with the author by Adèle Geras

Some time ago, I downloaded this book to my Kindle because I'd read a favourable review of it in the Times. Full disclosure: I love books to do with witchcraft and I've written on this blog about just such a one by my friend Livi Michael. That was about the Pendle Witches and this novel speaks in the voice of a sister of the infamous Witchfinder, Matthew Hopkins. At the back of the book there's a piece by Underdown in which we discover that Hopkins had siblings but that little is known about them. This gap in the history gives the writer the space to create Alice, elder stepsister of the man who spread terror and destruction in the Tendring Hundreds of Essex and Suffolk during the 1640s. Many women were hanged and before that, subjected to terrible tests to discover whether or not they were witches.

Alice is a wonderful fictional creation who writes with a voice that is clear, unsensational and intelligent and which seems to reach us through the centuries with the power of someone speaking directly to us. It's a voice that carries weight. It is full of emotional understanding. It describes everything in a way that is plain but deep; full of emotion but also unhysterical. The real events that unfold are known to anyone interested in the period, but Alice, speaking about her brother, provides a context and a background that is most persuasive. Why does a man become a Witchfinder? What impels him? Are there psychological reasons for his dreadful fixation for rooting out women with supposed supernatural powers? And what of Alice? Why is she returning to Manningtree after the death of her husband in London?

Others play a part in the disclosures that follow: Alice's mother-in-law, Bridget, whose life has been entwined with that of Matthew's late mother; Rebecca, one of the accused women; men of varying degrees of stupidity and greed; many others in the community.

The witches Hopkins brought to their horrific ends are seen to be everything we suspected they might have been: slightly deranged, or eccentric, or strange looking, or gifted in the matter of using herbs and natural remedies for this or that, but with no more supernatural powers than a chicken. Still (and this is one of the best things about this novel) there is also the unexplained. There is such a thing as ill-wishing: people do sometimes want bad things to happen to their neighbours and their enemies. Above all, there is childbirth and the changes that it can wreak on even the most balanced of minds. Now we call such behaviour 'hormonal' and we know about post-natal depression but that's a very modern concept. It wasn't even properly talked about and understood as late as the 1970s.


Beth Underdown has woven a story of grief, anxiety, depression, longing, and the love of a sister for her brother together with an account of a febrile time of religious wars and desperately wild and frightening superstition.


The tone of the telling is compelling throughout. You are entirely in Alice's head, apart from several quotations from historical accounts. I am not going to spoil anyone's pleasure by leaking the surprise in the narrative, but there is one. Read this book and find out what it is...you won't regret it.


I asked Beth some questions via email and I reproduce her answers below. The photographs are also Beth's, taken in the Manningtree area.

1) The Witchfinder's Sister is a very accomplished début and I wonder whether it really is your first attempt at novel or whether there are any other novels in your bottom drawer. Had you been writing for a long time before you were published?


It really is my first novel! I was interested in the seventeenth century
before I came across the story of Matthew Hopkins, and at the point
that I found the subject of The Witchfinder’s Sister I’d completed a
chapter or so of a novel based on the life of the herbalist Nicholas
Culpepper. But it didn’t really feel vital (I think due to a lack of
villain!)


And as soon as I started to research the Hopkins witch hunts, I
changed tack straight away. Before starting work on The Witchfinder’s
Sister I’d been writing bits and bobs of short fiction for years. But I’d
never sent anything off, or finished or indeed been happy with much
of what I’d written. I think I was waiting for the right topic – the right mould
to pour my jelly into!
2) Can you outline where you interest in history comes from? Were you a bookish child?

I was an extremely bookish child – most of my free time was spent
reading, until I left home for university. And I always liked history,
too, and studied it up to A-level – but I never got brilliant marks.
I have quite a bad memory, so being examined on dates wasn’t
perhaps my strong suit.


I think the interest in history was always there – but maybe it came
in the first place from family holidays – my parents liked hiking, and
we holidayed a lot in the UK, places like Scotland and Cornwall.
Castles, standing stones and things like that were used as treats to
convince my brother and me that long hikes were a good idea!


3) What was it about this story that appealed to you?

I think initially it was the shock of it – the scale of what had happened,
the number of deaths. From that came an outrage that propelled me
through some of the research – but I think what sustained me as I
developed the story was a growing interest not just in telling people
about the witch hunts, but also in figuring out why and how they
could have come to pass.


4) Did you have any private rules about mixing fiction with fact?

For this book, my rule was that everything to do with the women
who were persecuted in the witch hunts – their names, their stories –
should be kept as accurate as possible. Likewise, Hopkins’s movements,
and what is known about his life – where he was on a certain date,
for instance – all that should be accurate. But everything about his
emotional life is invented, or speculated – and Alice, Joseph and
Bridget are completely fictional. I think my private rules for this book
came from balancing a sense of an ethical responsibility to Hopkins’s
victims against the necessity of inventing full emotional lives for my
characters – and of telling an engaging story.


5) You are very sparing with the physical description but the places you wrtie about are very clear and present to the reader. Can you put your finger on how you evoked the Essex of the 1640s?

This is a very hard question to answer. I did a lot of wandering
around the Tendring Hundred (the area around Manningtree,
where the witch hunts began) with the oldest map I could find
– which was one from 1810, but still useful because it subtracted
railways and A-roads from the landscape. I looked into how the
agriculture, shipping and fishing would have changed. I also did a
fair amount of research into seventeenth century domesticity – 
what people ate, what different things cost. Beyond that, I think it 
was an effort of imagination – and I’m really glad you feel it works!

6) Are there any other pieces of fiction that influenced you in the writing of this book?

There are many writers I admire, but I think the works that influenced
this book most consciously were Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.
I love how ordinary and vital the dialogue in those works is – how
well and how naturally they avoid the ‘thees and thous’ that are so
hard to pull off (but also hard to avoid) in historical fiction. I feel that
Hilary Mantel’s approach to the early modern period in fiction is
incredibly fresh and frank, and I’ve tried to replicate some of that approach in 
The Witchfinder’s Sister.
7) You teach Creative Writing at Manchester. How do you integrate the writing of fiction into your day job?

I’m on a 0.5 FTE contract at Manchester, and my colleagues have
been very good to me this year in allowing me to have half the year
teaching and half the year not. So I was teaching a full load between September and Christmas – and didn’t do a scrap of writing, but enjoyed it immensely! Then this semester I’m not teaching, and am
able to make some headway with Book Two and also do events and nice things like that for TWS.

8) How did WS come to be published? Do you have a follow up to WS? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

The Witchfinder’s Sister had a long road to publication. It started
with my agent, Nelle Andrew, who spotted me in the anthology put out
by the Creative Writing MA course that I took at Manchester (where
I now teach!). Nelle got in touch with me, and we met a few
times – the book was in the very early stages, but she seemed to
love and understand what I wanted to do with it, so I signed up
with her. Then some years went by while I worked on the book, but
also did a bit of living (a succession of different jobs, a marriage and
then a divorce, a painful illness followed by an operation that mostly
fixed it). At last I quit my day job to give the book one last proper
push, and Nelle found it a home with Katy Loftus at Viking, who was absolutely 
the best editor I could have hoped to meet.


There will be a sequel to TWS one day – and if you read the book
(Do not cheat and skip to end!AG) you might guess what and where
it will be. But next I’m writing something a little different – still
a bit Gothic, but later in history – 1899/1900. It’s about death,
but also love and friendship – and that’s probably as much as I can say 
at the moment!

 

Two Families in the 1640s - by Ann Swinfen

I have written three novels about two families, set in the seventeenth century. All have their roots in true events. Like most people, I suspect, I’m heartily thankful I did not live in that tempestuous period, yet it is endlessly fascinating. Social and religious pressures had been building up over the preceding hundred years or so, and in the seventeenth century – in England as elsewhere – they exploded. Ordinary men and women were better informed, even more literate, than before. Developments in printing and the foundation of many grammar schools had contributed to educating a population which was prepared to question the traditional religious establishment and the social hierarchy. The dictatorial stance of the early Stuart monarchs, especially Charles I, was the final spark which lit this particular powder keg.

Charles I

It is little wonder that the times gave rise to the revolutionary ideas of Levellers and Diggers, to confrontation between an elected Parliament and an anointed king, to clashes between Puritans and traditionalists. Opportunist land-grabbers fought with rural communities. Soldiers mutinied. Portents were observed. And innocent people – often old and poor – were sentenced to death for witchcraft.

The first of my novels set in this period, Flood, arose from my reading about how unscrupulous speculators seized the communally-held lands of East Anglia and undertook illegal drainage schemes with often disastrous results. The local people fought back, and amongst their leaders were women, many of whom were injured or imprisoned, some of whom died.

h

To compound the horrors of the situation, this was also the time of ‘licensed’ iconoclasts who smashed up parish churches, and of the monstrous career of Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, whose fanatical search for victims ranged over the same area. 

Matthew Hopkins

I chose as my protagonist in Flood Mercy Bennington, the daughter of a yeoman farmer, who becomes one of the women leaders of the fenlanders, fighting for her family and village, trying to save their lands and livelihood. The second novel in the Fenland series takes the story further; Mercy continues the struggle in the country while her brother Tom travels to the Inns of Court in London, in search of the fenlanders’ charter granting their lands.

So how did I come across the account of this struggle in the first place? It was during my research into events in England in the mid seventeenth century for quite a different book. As part of the general research, it never became an element in that book but remained filed away in my memory, to emerge again later as the story of Flood.

And what was the other book? This Rough Ocean.

I suppose I’m like most writers: some ideas come swiftly and are written at once, others stay with you for a long time, quietly maturing, like a fine wine.

We need to backtrack many years here. My father-in-law had done some research into the Swinfen family of Swinfen in Staffordshire, partly spurred on by another descendent who worked for Burke’s Peerage. It emerged that the family was very well documented. A Norman knight, shortly after the Conquest, had married the heiress to the Swinfen estates and taken the name Swinfen in place of his own (de Auste). As landed armigerous gentry, they were well covered in the historical record and early genealogies. Like most families of their class, they carried out their duties as substantial landowners over the centuries – not aristocracy but holding an important position in their own shire.

Also like other gentry families, they began to rise under the Tudors and came to real prominence in the seventeenth century. An interesting link with my own Christoval Alvarez series of novels is John Swinfen (c.1560-1632), grandfather of one of the protagonists of This Rough Ocean. When Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was executed for treason in 1601, his widow, Frances Walsingham, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham (Christoval’s employer), was deprived of her lands and her son of his inheritance. John Swinfen helped her to recover them from James I. He also christened one of his sons Deveroxe just after Essex’s execution, which must have taken some courage.

Earl of Essex

However, it was this John’s grandson, John Swinfen or Swynfen (1613-1694) who is the most interesting. He attended Cambridge and Grey’s Inn, then became a Member of Parliament at a young age. He was therefore at the centre of the most dramatic events of the seventeenth century – born while Shakespeare was still alive, he lived through the reigns of James I, Charles I, the Protectorate, Charles II, James II and into that of William and Mary, and also through the Plague and Fire of London. Caught up in the struggles between Parliament and the king, he was imprisoned twice – once by Cromwell for opposing the killing of the king, once by James II on a trumped-up accusation of being involved in Monmouth’s rebellion. Ah, the dangers of being a Moderate! Both extremes hate you! He lived long enough to be one of the founders of the Whig (Liberal) Party.

Oliver Cromwell

James II

I found this entire career fascinating, and my husband plans to write the definitive biography, but I wanted to capture some of this rich life in a novel. Clearly the whole life was far too large a subject, so I decided to concentrate on the period immediately following Pride’s Purge. John and his Moderate colleagues had persuaded Parliament to vote to treat with the king on the basis of an agreement whereby most of the powers of government would be handed over from the king to Parliament. The Moderates rejoiced. An end to the Civil War at last, on terms favourable to Parliament.

Pride's Purge

The next morning, all those MPs who had supported the treaty were driven away from Parliament by armed soldiers of Cromwell’s army, commanded by Colonel Pride. The most important, including John, were imprisoned. The MPs not excluded were believed to be favourable to Cromwell and his supporters, but many soon followed their consciences and withdrew, leaving the mockery of the ‘Rump Parliament’.

My novel, This Rough Ocean, tells the story of the imprisoned John and of his wife Anne, who makes a dangerous winter journey home to Staffordshire with her young children. Once there she finds the estate and its people on the brink of collapse into ruin and starvation. She alone must take on her husband’s role, running the large estate and averting disaster. The two stories are intertwined, as husband and wife each fight for survival.

I have always been intrigued by the lives of ordinary people in the past. We hear much about great rulers and men of power, but dig a little deeper and there is a great deal to be discovered about everyone else, the poor, the quiet farmers, the craftsmen, the minor players in the large events. In Flood, Betrayal and This Rough Ocean I’ve sought to tell the stories of those turbulent years of the seventeenth century, based on two families – a yeoman family and a gentry family – ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events.

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

Historical Fiction for Teens? You must be mad! - Celia Rees

... was the reaction I got when I first pitched my proposal for Witch Child. I had the idea in about 1996 when I was doing some research for a completely different kind of book: a contemporary, supernatural thriller called Soul Taker. I was looking for info on magicians, necromancers, bad guys who could do real magic, in the Oxford Book of the Supernatural by D.J. Enright.



I didn't really find what I was looking for, but I did find an account of Matthew Hopkins, self appointed Witch Finder General. I'd heard of Hopkins, seen the 1960's Hammer Horror movie, and knew that he was a nasty piece of work, responsible for the deaths of maybe 300 people (mostly women) in and around East Anglia at the time of the English Civil War. As I refreshed my memory, an idea began to nag at me and I immediately abandoned what I was supposed to be doing and looked him up in another book which showed this woodcut of him, complete with witches and familiars.

I was looking at this picture and thinking, speculating about what it meant to be a witch. I thought maybe it was part of a European shamanistic tradition that involved a knowledge of healing, a certain amount of clairvoyant ability and perhaps a little light shape shifting. In British folklore, witches were supposed to be able to turn themselves into hares. In the words of the Scottish witch, Isobel Gowdie:

I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sych and meickle care

I did not think that it had anything to do with worshipping the Devil. I thought that was likely to all be in the minds of the persecutors. Then I began to wonder, where else in the world had a tradition of shamanism at this time? Simultaneously, I was beginning to make up a story about a girl who is a witch, or is being brought up in this tradition by her grandmother. What if a Matthew Hopkins lookalike comes to their village, tries the grandmother and hangs her? What happens to the girl? Where can she go? Shift back now to the parallel thought - where in the world did shamanistic people live? America. Settlers going to America took orphans with them, I knew from my American Cookbook (information can come from the most unlikely sources) so she could go with a group Puritans. They did not just take orphan teens with them, they also took their fears and superstitions which would culminate in the last great outbreak of Western witch persecution in Salem, Massachusetts. I knew all this, but something else was intriguing me now. What if this girl met Native Americans? She would be caught between two groups of people: one who would revere her as a person of power, the other would want to hang her.

It was a strong idea and I knew I wanted to write it, even though part of me wanted to unthink it immediately. It would involve a lot of research and I'd never written a straight historical fiction before. Apart from that, I had to interest a modern teen audience. I decided to make the historical part into a diary, to bind the reader to the girl, and that immediately opened another realm of possibilities. I really wanted to do it now all I had to do was convince a publisher. That was the hard part. Historical for teenagers? Are you mad? Dead in the water. They just aren't interested. So I took that as a 'No'. Undaunted, I set off on another path. I wrote a long, detailed proposal and sent it in for an Arts Council Grant. Nothing doing here, either. So I put it in a drawer. Then, completely out of the blue, I got a phone call from my agent. Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury was looking for somebody to write a book about a girl who was a witch. Would I be interested?


The rest, as they say, is history. In 2000, Bloomsbury published the book beautifully; Candlewick Press did the same in America in the following year. The rights were sold in 28 other countries and the book is studied in schools here in the U.K. and abroad. Turns out teens have an appetite for historical fiction after all. I became a writer of mainly historical fiction and I like to think that I helped to break down the received prejudice against a genre that has the power to enthrall, entertain, inform the mind and excite the imagination all at the same time.

Website: www.celiarees.com

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