Witsh

LoveReading Says

Steeped in menacing mystery and Welsh women’s history, Mari Ellis Dunning’s Witsh is an extraordinary story — a beautifully-written, round-bellied book that tells of female fertility charms contorted into curses by men seeking to eradicate the healing work of wise-women in a Welsh border village in the 16th century.

After enduring three miscarriages, gentry woman Doli enlists the assistance of a local wise-woman who gives her a fertility charm to see her fall pregnant and bring her unborn child to term. When a servant finds the charm, Doli’s husband, a man seeking to extend his influence, takes his cue from beyond the Welsh border, where folks once esteemed as wise-women are being hanged for witchcraft. Desperate, Doli defies her husband’s orders to stay well away from a woman he claims is a “witsh” as superstitions, suspicions and rumours run rife among villagers. 

Throughout this captivating work, a powerful dichotomy is established between female sisterhood and stewardship of life, and male divisiveness and judgements of death. There’s a sense of socio-political shifts, too — English infiltration of Welsh culture and language, which is deemed to be a “wild tongue” as news comes of “trouble on the marches. Hangings over the border. Women swinging”. Villagers are pitted against each other by ruthlessly ambitious landed men who care more for reputation and personal gain than for the lives of women, and those who have yet to be born under the charge of wise women who’ve long healed and saved lives.

At once enchanting, lucid and raw, and sparked by a real-life accusation of witchcraft, Witsh rings with a rich sense of shifting tides of history as it ripples with powerful feminist currents.

Joanne Owen

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