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ON THURSDAY, we embrace the dark side. Witches’ hats are donned to take children trick or treating. Doors are festooned in cobwebs and creatures of the night.

For one night only — Hallowe’en — we celebrate the season of the witch. But the rest of the year, society is still suspicious of unchecked, especially unconventional, female power. Terms like witch-hunts and hexes are invoked from the U.S. presidency down.

The past two years, however, have seen a welter of books casting those defined as witches in a sympathetic light. Released in February, The Familiars by Stacey Halls has gone on to be a huge bestseller.

The backdrop to the novel is the 1612 Pendle witch trials in Lancashire. Its heroine, Fleetwood Shuttleworth, the 17-year-old mistress of Gawthorpe Hall, is terrified her fourth pregnancy will end in miscarriage, like its predecessors.

She engages the services of Alice Gray, a midwife, who prescribes various herbs.

Fleetwood’s health blooms, but then Alice, and several of her relatives, are denounced as witches. Are they really wrongdoers? Or just poor, weak people whose land is coveted?

In the award-nominated Circe, Madeline Miller returns to the Homeric ancient world she brought to life so vividly in The Song of Achilles. Here, her protagonist is the island sorceress who bewitches Odysseus’s men, transforming them into pigs. In Miller’s interpretation, however, Circe unleashes her considerable powers in self-defence.

John Updike’s 1984 comic novel, The Witches Of Eastwick, is set amid a New England coven established by two divorcées and their widowed friend. Sexual relations with devilish millionaire Daryl Van Horne unleash their supernatural powers.

Updike claimed his book was pro-feminist, as it celebrated female power, but others take a dim view that it takes a man to untap that power.

For centuries, women have been decried as witches for bucking the norm, or showing resistance. This week, embrace your witchiness.