Enchanting read sparks women’s horror
Part fairy tale, part feminist manifesto, the Victorian tale is heavily researched with superb prose and emotion
When Ami McKay was writing her new novel, The Witches of New York, she discovered an unsettling fact. Her nine times great aunt Mary Ayer Parker, a 55-year-old widow, was hung for witchcraft in the 17th century.
The distant relative was imprisoned, tried and convicted, and on Sept. 22,1692, she went to the gallows. (An edict to end such hangings saved her daughter Sarah’s life.)
This family connection, of course, deepened the bestselling author’s interest in the topic and imbued the novel with a profound sense of outrage over the treatment of women.
The Witches of New York — which the Nova Scotia scribe has described as “part Victorian fairy tale, part penny dreadful, part feminist manifesto” — is set in the Manhattan of 1880, “a city of astonishments,” two hundred years after the Salem witch trials.
Adelaide Thom (Moth from McKay’s hit novel The Virgin Cure) and Eleanor St. Clair run a charming shop near Madison Square, Tea and Sympathy, serving afternoon delights to high-society ladies with a dash of magic on the side.
Watched over by a talking raven Perdu, they serve up steaming cups of hibiscus tea, delicate cakes and, discretely, herbal remedies for ailments ranging from insomnia to unwanted pregnancies.
One day in September, a sweet-natured teen called Beatrice Dunn turns up looking for employment. She has arrived by train, crossing paths with a mystical Egyptian obelisk, known as “Cleopatra’s Needle,” and seemingly picking up some of its strange magic along the way.
Her appearance triggers a series of unexplainable events and it soon becomes clear that there’s something special about this girl.
Beatrice joins the tea shop as an apprentice and under the women’s tutelage hones her unique gift: Communing with the dead. On Adelaide’s insistence, she pairs up with a kind-hearted doctor, Quinn Brody, and the two begin conducting séances with a “spiritoscope,” a small Ouija-board-like device.
In the meantime, the women must contend with a tide of rising fear that is sweeping New York City, a public hysteria about dark magic stoked by a violent, misogynist preacher, Rev. Francis Townsend, and his flock of self-righteous followers.
On the night that Dr. Brody is set to present his research on the supernatural to a curious crowd at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Beatrice goes missing. The tea shop women and their doctor friend conduct a frantic search that takes them from morgues to red light districts and lunatic asylums.
The hunt forces each to confront their own past, their beliefs about magic, their society’s view of women — and, ultimately, the existence of evil in the world.
Fans of Victorian fiction will enjoy this outing. All of tropes of the time are present here: the glamour of the Gilded Age, the tragedy of prostitutes and Fallen Women, the suffering of the toiling lower classes, the growing power of the suffragettes and the ever-present spectres of ghosts, angels and demons. The book is richly researched and packed with entic- ing historical detail.
McKay’s prose is, as always, superb — the descriptions enchanting, the narrative arcs compelling, the characters dear (or deliciously sinister, as the case may be).
But it is the emotion of the novel that lingers longest, the pervading horror over the persecution of women — and what this persecution has done to repress women’s talents, impede their progress and stamp out their voices.
In her author’s note, McKay raises this issue, pointing to author L. Frank Baum’s mother-in-law, the suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who was a model for the good sorceress Glinda of his Oz books and who bewitched McKay as a child.
Quoting her 1893 manifesto Women, Church and State — “death by torture was a method of the church for the repression of woman’s intellect, knowledge being held as evil or dangerous in her hands” — McKay questions what Gage would make of today’s women’s movement.
“I’m guessing she’d say there’s still plenty of work to be done,” McKay writes. Many of her readers will conclude the same. Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer.