Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

"A young English orphan arrives in America to be greeted by an atmosphere of shadowy terror and a wave of Puritan suspicion. She settles with her uncle's family in Salem, Massachusetts, on the eve of the world's most notorious witch hunt." "Lois Barclay is a typical ingenue: a well of affection and understanding waiting to be tapped. The New England she experiences, however, is prey to a host of fears - of Indians, of witches, of the Evil One himself. Lois finds all her attempts at friendship misunderstood, her Anglican upbringing a source of mistrust and censure, and her very attractiveness a potential curse. In this moving novella, Gaskell provides a fictionalised account of one of the victims of the Salem witch trials of 1692, using it to highlight the very human dangers of religious bigotry and sexual repression."--Jacket.

Lois the Witch

loisesya

“I do not care. I say it again. Either Lois Barclay is a Witch, or she is not. If she is, it has been foredoomed for her, for I have seen a vision of her death as a condemned witch for  many months past - and the voice has told me there was but one escape for her, Lois - the voice you know —.” 

“And so they dragged Lois away from the congregation of Christians to the gaol, to await her trial. I say ‘dragged her', because, although she was docile enough to have followed them whither they would, she was now so faint as to require extraneous force- poor Lois! who should have been carried and tended lovingly in her state of exhaustion, but, instead, was so detested by the multitude, who looked upon her as an accomplice of Satan in all his evil doings, that they cared no more how they treated her than a careless boy minds how he handles the toad that he is going to throw over the wall.”

 “She gazed wildly around, stretched out her arms as if to some person in the distance, who was yet visible to her, and cried out once with a voice that thrilled through all who heard it, ‘Mother!’ Directly afterwards, the body of Lois the Witch swung in the air, and every one stood, with hushed breath, with a sudden wonder, like a fear of deadly crime, fallen upon them. The stillness and the silence were broken by one crazed and mad, who came rushing up the steps of the ladder, and caught Lois's body in his arms, and kissed her lips with wild passion. And then, as if it were true what the people believed, that he was possessed by a demon, he sprang down, and rushed through the crowd, out of the bounds of the city, and into the dark dense forest, and Manasseh Hickson was no more seen of Christian man.”

Ralph Lucy's voice trembled as he spoke: ‘All this will not bring my Lois to life again, or give me back the hope of my youth.’

Lois the Witch quotes

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