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From the fairy tales read to us as children to the costumes every Halloween, the figure of the witch has been with most of us for our entire lives. Unkempt and warty, the witch of our childhood was generally a repulsive creature flying on a broomstick beside her toad or black cat.
Yet recent years have marked a reinvention of this ancient character, giving her a modern twist in a new subgenre of literature that some are calling “witch lit”.
The novels that have been categorised as belonging to this new subgenre often take inspiration from historical events such as the witch trials of the medieval and early modern periods.
A.K. Blakemore’s award-winning novel The Manningtree Witches (2021), for example, is set in the town of Manningtree in 1643 just as Matthew Hopkins begins his hunt against witches. Jenni Fagan’s short novel Hex: Darkland Tales (2022) revolves, in part, around the story of Geillis Duncan, one of the first women to be accused of witchcraft in the North Berwick witch trials.
We can see this resurgence in film and TV too. In Netflix’s Wednesday (2022), the young protagonist learns about her magical heritage through her ancestor Goody Addams, who was accused of witchcraft in the 1600s.
Popular shows like Outlander (2014), The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) and A Discovery of Witches (2018) also prominently feature historical witchcraft beliefs and practices.
The witches featured in this new media are rarely comparable to the dirty hags that appeared in older stories. The new witch is often beautiful, at once dark and gothic and ethereal and wild.
Even Disney’s sequel to Hocus Pocus (2022) features a more sympathetic version of the Sanderson sisters. Winnie Sanderson, although still a child-killing witch, now becomes a woman who values her coven of sisters above all else.
In all of this, one thing is clear: the story of the witch is being rewritten and a new type of tale is taking its place.
An important addition to the witch lit sub-genre is Kirsty Logan’s Now She is Witch (2023). It perfectly captures the magic of this kind of story. The novel follows Lux, a girl who sells poisons and poppets, and the mysterious Else who is seeking revenge against a lord who kills women for witchcraft.
Many of the elements we have come to expect from witchcraft literature are evident in this tale. Through her protagonist, Logan picks at the hypocrisy of the rhetoric used to condemn witches. As Else puts it: “Men desire women but it is not their fault, it’s because women are wicked”.
Lux is also on a journey of self-discovery. She is trying to understand the place that she occupies in the world and the names that have been given to her, be it maiden, mother, crone or witch. Where this novel really finds its brilliance, is in the moments that it strays from the path that has been set out for it in this genre.
The medieval setting of Logan’s story feels real and textured but there is also an otherworldly, almost carnivalesque feeling to the novel. The journey that Lux takes through woods populated by a colourful cast of characters, is almost reminiscent of the voyage Little Red Riding Hood takes to her grandmother’s house. Though Lux is as much a wolf as she is a lost little girl.
In her novel, Logan is making use of not only historical beliefs around witchcraft but also folklore and fairy tales. Her witch is complicated: powerful and somehow also powerless, woman and sometimes man and sometimes neither and sometimes both, real and made up, dangerous and innocent, girl and wolf.
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At the centre of the story is a hunger from both Lux and Else to be allowed to be more than just one thing, to simply exist without worrying about what word or role will be used to define them.
It is not only in television and literature that the witch has gained popularity in recent years. Feminist activists and writers such as Silvia Federici and Mona Chollet are turning to the witch as a figure of injustice, power or rebellion.
One glance through the section of TikTok that has been affectionately named WitchTok reveals a number of people identifying as witches and calling out for power through the use of healing crystals or tarot cards.
At a time when female bodies are still policed in many parts of the world, the witch retains the power to speak through history and across generations. Perhaps this process of rewriting the witch is actually giving writers a new way to tell the stories of women.
Lucy Atkinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
If children are built, in part, by the books they’re raised on, then I was all Roald Dahl. From my small bedroom in suburban Essex, his stories allowed me to try on new and distinctly more exciting lives for size.
There was James aboard his giant peach, George with his marvellous granny vanquishing medicine and of course, Charlie, who wins a trip to a chocolate factory and a lifetime’s supply of sweets — for the grandchild of a dentist, an impossible dream.
And Dahl was my dream maker, a fairy godfather, a living wizard. So much so that when I, the adoring fan, eventually met him at a Puffin Club convention I was rendered mute under his spell.
His books represented escape from the humdrum of the everyday that I recognised even aged seven. And more than that, they were an education. I learned new words as well as important lessons. Enemies can be bested, no matter how much bigger they are, grown-ups aren’t always right and reading books is, in itself, a kind of magic.
However, looking back through a more forensic lens, there were other, less edifying ideas I picked up as well.
From The Twits, I learned that the “African language” that the Muggle-Wump monkeys spoke was “weird”. From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I learned that being “enormously fat” was a character flaw, on a par with selfishness. From The Witches, I learned that being bald, as a woman, meant you were probably evil and definitely ugly. Daft, obviously, but still it lingered in my 30s when to my abject horror, I developed alopecia.
So, I was invested in the argument when, in February 2023, it was revealed that Dahl’s publishers, Puffin, have made some tweaks for the latest print runs. There has been an outcry, with everyone from author Salman Rushdie to UK prime minister Rishi Sunak weighing in to condemn this “censorship”, as if Puffin were burning or banning books.
The fact that this was done in discussion with Dahl’s estate cannot assuage them, nor that these small changes are the kind made every day to books either pre-publication or before a new print run.
Read more: In the far from diverse publishing industry, sensitivity readers are vital
And the changes are small. That language is no longer “weird”, just “African”. Augustus Gloop is no longer “enormously fat”, just “enormous”. Mrs Twit is no longer “beastly and ugly”, just “beastly”. A witch posing as a woman is no longer likely to be a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman” but may be a “top scientist or running a business”.
The stories and Dahl’s voice with his energetic, inventive turns of phrase, remain intact. A win, surely? Or is it? Because, while the language might be superficially “fixed”, the books still contain problematic themes and character traits.
Baldness in women is still linked to badness. Being “enormous” is still a character flaw. And this is before we begin to unpack the Oompa-Loompas, albeit in their new gender neutral guise.
When we read, we learn what it might be like to be someone other than our self. We find common ground as well as differences. In other words, we learn empathy. But through Dahl, the spectrum of those with whom we’re invited to empathise or even to recognise as “like me” is fairly narrow, while too many others are sidelined as bad in their difference, potentially leading readers to reject them off the page as well.
So what is the answer to this and other “difficult” texts? (Dahl, of course, isn’t the only author to have equated ugliness or disability with villainy, nor to display chronic fatphobia.)
As an expert in creative writing, my preference would be to let them quietly fall out of print. No “censorship”, but no reruns either. Don’t give them a brand new foil wrapper that suggests the contents are fresh and 21st century. That implies a currency, a relevance, a truth.
Instead let them sit on the shelves of parents and grandparents (who are the real Dahl fans now, children have far wider taste) and be seen, with their cracked covers and dog-eared pages, for what they are – things of the past, to be appreciated as such.
It’s not as if, without Dahl, there will be a void with no funny books, no magic books, no books about giants to fill it. Bookshops don’t have enough shelves for the myriad new releases. The Lollies Prize celebrates brilliantly funny new books for children every year. Empathy Lab curates an annual collection of around 50 new books that don’t skimp on stakes or adventure or menace, but also work to nurture inclusivity.
I was a child of Dahl and am indebted to him for nurturing my love of words. But I’m glad my own daughter showed scant interest, for there are more stories out there, and better ones, to shape her generation and the next.
Jo Nadin is a member of the Society of Authors (SOA) and the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). Her book, No Man's Land, is part of the Empathy Lab collection. Her book, The Worst Class in the World Gets Worse, is shortlisted for the Lollies Prize.
“Love” is the first word in Ariel, the collection of poems published by Faber and Faber in 1965 that made Sylvia Plath one of the most famous poets of the post-war generation.
In many ways, Ariel, as Plath conceived it, is all about love. In the “restored” Ariel – the original manuscript that Sylvia Plath left on the desk of her London flat before her death – the word “love” recurs over 25 times.
After the “lies, lies, and a grief” in The Couriers, there also is “love, love, my season”.
Plath never saw Ariel’s success. In the early hours of February 11 1963, during one of the coldest winters for decades, she took her own life. She had been suffering from a severe depression, compounded by mismanagement of her medication and the breakdown of her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes.
She left a manuscript of poems titled Ariel and 19 other poems, 13 of which she had written in the last weeks of her life.
In editing and publishing the 1965 collection, Hughes rearranged Plath’s original manuscript, taking out what he felt to be weaker poems and including the best of the last 19. The Ariel most readers came to know is a far darker collection than Plath intended, troubled by her breakdown and impending suicide.
This had a significant impact on how Plath’s work was read in the years after her death and how the myth of Plath as “high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death” was created.
A new generation of scholars have begun unpacking the immense complexity of Plath’s writings, emphasising her political, historical and environmental interests and her importance for women writers.
Ariel’s opening poem, Morning Song, addresses a child at the moment of its birth. The child takes centre stage in this secular nativity until it finds its voice, and “The clear vowels rise like balloons”. In Ariel, Plath marked herself out as one of the first great poets of motherhood, setting out on a path others would follow.
In her manuscript, Plath had scored out several possible titles before she settled on Ariel. Ariel is the spirit imprisoned and freed by Prospero in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, a major inspiration for Plath.
Ariel is also the name of a horse Sylvia rides in an early draft of the titular poem, which she describes as “of my colour”. Plath’s natural hair colour was light reddish brown, the colour of “God’s lioness”.
The titular Ariel – too often read as a kind of suicide note – is a poem of transcendence that moves towards the freedom of a new life. The “dead hands, dead stringencies” have been shucked off in the rider’s flight, and bursts out of the darkness, becoming one with the animal (the horse is often associated with poetry).
Reading the “restored” as opposed to the 1965 Ariel, is a very different experience – one of hope after the struggle of winter, to the new life of spring.
Plath’s “bee poems”, the final sequence in the restored Ariel, end with the word “spring” and images of transformation and rebirth are used throughout the collection. Lady Lazarus will rise from the ashes “one year in every ten”. In The Night Dances, the baby in the cot inspires the mother to a planetary transcendence. Poppies in October are “a gift, a love gift”. In Letter in November, there is “Green in the air”.
Plath remains one of the great poets of depression, fearlessly encountering her mental suffering in poems such as Elm – “I know the bottom […] I do not fear it; I have been there” and The Moon and the Yew Tree, where the moon is “quiet / With the O-gape of complete despair.”
Sylvia Plath is also a poet of protest and her fury against a world dominated by men finds expression in a group of poems in the restored Ariel. There’s The Rabbit Catcher, The Detective and my personal favourite, The Courage of Shutting Up, which was omitted from Hughes’ 1965 edition.
While some of Hughes’ editorial omissions were wise – weaker poems, poems that might offend – one of his greatest mistakes was obscuring the political and burgeoning feminist aspects of Plath’s writing.
Plath died on the eve of second wave feminism (Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published just five days after her death). Her poetry, however, was quickly taken up as an important expression of the feminist movement and her novel, The Bell Jar, found context as an essential critique of women’s place in post-war society.
It’s important to stress that one version of Ariel does not cancel out the other. Read alongside each other they create a different picture of Plath’s poetry – bigger, more complex and with a greater power to transform.
Sylvia Plath remains one of the few poets whose work reveals itself in new ways every time you encounter it and her power to speak to each new generation only becomes greater.
Sarah Corbett received funding from Arts Council England for the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival in 2022.
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