{"id":690,"date":"2018-10-14T12:10:20","date_gmt":"2018-10-14T11:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hebulstrode.co.uk\/?p=690"},"modified":"2020-02-13T08:30:28","modified_gmt":"2020-02-13T08:30:28","slug":"review-of-the-witchfinders-sister-by-beth-underdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hebulstrode.co.uk\/?p=690","title":{"rendered":"Review of ‘The Witchfinder’s Sister’ by Beth Underdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There are few episodes in English history that rival the notoriety of Matthew Hopkins\u2019s reign of terror as Witchfinder General in East Anglia, nurtured by the social turmoil of the Civil War. During the relatively short period of 1644-47, he, and his associates, are estimated to have been responsible for the hanging of around 300 women for witchcraft, approximately 60% of the total executed for this crime between the end of the fifteenth and the early eighteenth centuries when the crime of witchcraft was removed from the statute books. The woodcut image from the frontispiece of his book The Discovery Witches<\/em> is a familiar and chilling one, showing Hopkins himself observing two witches naming their pictured familiars. Although Hopkins died at the age of 27 in 1647, he has enjoyed a lengthy afterlife in the popular imagination, spawning verse, a number of books, and, perhaps most famously, the film Witchfinder General<\/em><\/a> in which Vincent Price played the eponymous role. <\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

In her debut novel The Witchfinder\u2019s Sister<\/a><\/em>, Beth Underdown has approached Hopkins and his deeds through the eyes of a fictitious sister, Alice, which allows her to present the reader with the domestic Hopkins, as well as the public figure. She has taken the fragments of what is known about his life, and imaginatively fashioned a plausible Hopkins, who plays upon biblically-rooted popular fears and prejudices about women to unleash a wave of persecution that brings some solace to his damaged self. <\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

Written as a first-person memoir, the style is detailed and intimate, with a great deal of atmospheric description that is at once one of its strengths, as well as one of its weaknesses, for if I have any criticism of this novel it is with respect to its pace, which is as sluggish as the waters of an East Anglian river. That said, this novel manages to produce an appropriate sense of suffocating entrapment, paranoia, and fatalism, and delivers an ending with a suitably satisfying twist.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Share this:<\/h3>