Bury Lit Fest: Talking women and witchcraft with author Jill Dawson

Frequently drawing on the people and places of her adopted East Anglian home - from crime writer Patricia Highsmith’s time in Suffolk to war poet Rupert Brooke’s life in Grantchester - Jill Dawson is the author of 11 novels, a volume of poetry and a number of anthologies. Her latest book, which she’ll discuss at Bury St Edmunds Literature Festival this Sunday (October 13), is The Bewitching, inspired by the true story of The Witches of Warboys

I felt The Witches of Warboys was a topic waiting to be explored, but I hadn’t found my angle, if you like. My first piece of research was going to the church at Warboys. I saw a funny little stone, very low down, like a face looking out. Nobody knows why it’s there; there's an idea it was a joke the mason made. You wouldn’t see it sitting in the congregation. You would only really see it if you were a child or lying down - that’s what set off my imagination.

The girls at the centre of the story, the five daughters, are afflicted by this mysterious illness. They have quite dramatic epileptic episodes - you can imagine how scary it must have been for their parents. This was during the Reformation. When people were disallowed their own ways of dealing with sickness - using some herbs, going to a local ‘cunning woman’, sprinkling some holy water - what would they do? It all goes underground and becomes forbidden.

Were the girls lying? Were they bewitched? What’s the third option? That’s always where my mind goes; to the thing that’s hard to articulate. I have great confidence in my reader; they don’t need everything spelled out. Then the novel is alive, if readers can have a different view.

There is often a lot of linking in my thinking. I was writing during lockdown and kept seeing people on Twitter saying ‘Oh, I saw this or that neighbour out without a mask’; there was this sense of policing one another. It struck me this was the kind of environment - this time of uncertainty, as the Reformation was - where people start to become poisonous. Things catch fire when, in a calmer time, they might just burn themselves out.

I then started thinking about the power wielded over women’s lives [in the 16th Century]. Especially disadvantaged women like the ‘witch’ Alice Samuel: she’s old, she’s poor, she’s a brewer and a baker - witches always seem to be them - and, most importantly of all, she’s outspoken. That was almost the worst crime! If only she had been sweeter, more polite, not tried to scold these girls or take on these powerful male characters, she might have done better.

At time of posting, a final few tickets to Jill’s Bury Lit Fest event were available – book yours HERE.

Giving voice to those who haven’t had one isn’t something I’ve done consciously [in my books], but it’s absolutely a common denominator. Publishing was a very male world when I started: Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Sebastian Faulks - that was the British scene. You’d never mistake them; they are doing their own voice, not the voice of a 7-year-old girl or an older woman from the 16th Century. I was trying to find my way and thinking ‘What can I do that others maybe aren’t doing?’ So I was always thinking about those voices - and about the opportunities women didn’t have.

I’ve bonded with the Fens in a way I haven’t with anywhere else. I’m quite glad the Fens are a kind of well-kept secret; I go on a walk every day in my village and I don’t see anyone, which, if you want to walk and think, as I do, is perfect. I think that’s a Fen characteristic: a certain independence of spirit; there isn’t that cosiness.

The new one is the first for a while not set in this part of the world. It’s about a young woman artist in the 1900s, another real person. She was part of this amazing and weird world - she was a member of [secret occult society] Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn with W. B. Yeats - yet, though her work is well known, she’s not well known at all. It’s called Pixie and will come out next summer.

I don’t particularly like revisionism, which is taking an historical story and then making the women incredibly empowered; what I think that says to people is ‘Oh, women in the past were pathetic then! Why weren’t they overthrowing the system?’ And I want to say ‘Hello? Look around you?’ We still live with patriarchy and violence against women and two women murdered a week by partners, so we haven’t cracked that one.

I don’t want to tell you an untruth about the past. I want to say there were strong women but there was tremendous oppression: that’s our past, that’s our story. And that’s the story I want to tell.

The Bewitching is out now in paperback, published by Sceptre and priced £9.99.

Find the full Bury Lit Fest programme HERE.