Elizabeth Anderson
Elizabeth Brown
Margaret Brown
Matthew Bulmer
Jane Copeland
Katherine Coultor
Elizabeth Dobson
Elianor Henderson
Alice Hume
Jane Hunter
Margaret Maddison
Jane Martin
Margaret Muffit
Mary Potts
Elianor Rogerson
Ann Watson
The magistrates sent their bell-man through the town, ringing his bell, and crying, all people that would bring in any complaint against any woman for a witch, they should be sent for, and tried by the person appointed.
Ralph Gardiner, England’s Grievance Discovered (1655)
As my social media gradually filled with images of leering pumpkins, jolly ghosts, arching black cats and tattered, broomstick-flying hags, a book concerning witches, which is to say the suspicion of witchcraft, found its timely way to me this month.1
The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn by Sue Reed is a YA/crossover time slip novel of social and ecological conscience: a novel about women’s suffering; about resisting the weight of expectations and finding meaningful female friendship; and about choosing the values that matter to us as individuals and staying true to those values in the face of society’s scorn. It’s a novel about history and magic.
As the story opens, Newcastle native Molly is being driven by her exasperated mother to stay for a week with her grandparents deep in the Northumbrian countryside. Through her first-person narrative, it becomes clear that Molly — ‘overweight’ (she’s a size 14), flame-haired (she hates her curls), and less socially adept that her schoolmates — has become caught up in an ultimately futile attempt to fit in, and that Molly’s mother, an NHS nurse overworked in the early days of Covid, has neither the time nor the resources to manage her increasingly wayward daughter. Molly expects to return in time for her imminent fifteenth birthday, which she plans to spend choosing a Pandora ring, getting her belly-button pierced, and enjoying a meal out at Wagamama. Fixated upon WhatsApp and Instagram on her phone, Molly assures both herself and her friends that her exile with the ageing hippies, her Nan and Grandad, will last no more than a week. But then the first lockdown is announced.
I wished I’d borrowed some wellies and a coat. I never wore a coat in town, and no one wore one to school, but it seemed colder, wetter here, somehow, and besides, no one was here to judge.
Sue Reed, The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn
Stuck in the countryside with few clothes or possessions (and no hair straighteners), Molly repeatedly comforts herself with the mantra that she cannot be seen by anyone who ‘matters’. To many of the adult readers who will enjoy The Rewilding, her perspective is clearly skewed, but for Sue Reed’s younger readership there is an important message here. And as Molly gradually acclimatises to Nan and Grandad’s sustainable eco-lifestyle, and then encounters a young runaway, Martha, sleeping rough in the woods, her estimation of what matters alters radically.
‘Sounds like you’re trying too hard,’ Nan said. ‘Ever thought you don’t need to fit in?’
Sue Reed, The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn
In many ways, then, The Rewilding conforms to the comfortingly familiar tropes of classic children’s fiction. Molly is sent away from home, to spend time in an environment where she is at odds with everyone and everything and is at first deeply unhappy, but where she will regain a sense of wonder at the depth and variety of the natural world and embark upon a personal journey which culminates in self-discovery and a place of belonging. But Reed’s very modern take on that story arc also enables her to address the far-from-comforting truths faced by young people today and, by having Molly remain in contact with her old life via social media, to show us that her true place of alienation is the one she has left behind. When Molly re-enters that world, as lockdown lifts, it is the lessons she has learned during her absence that will not only sustain her, but give her the confidence to pursue her own direction.
Reed writes Nan and Grandad’s self-sufficient lifestyle with all the confident panache of one who also lives it. Molly’s encounters with nature are woven into the narrative in a way which never interferes with the story, instead picking up on those elements of her everyday life which do make sense to her — the blue fire of a kingfisher, for example, echoes the current production of her drama group, a play entitled The Halcyon Days, to which she is chafing to return.
You could be anything you wanted at drama club. It was OK to be different there.
Sue Reed, The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn
This aspect of the novel takes on added poignancy in light of the events that preceded its publication. The felling of the Sycamore Gap tree, mere miles from Reed’s home and close to where the action in The Rewilding takes place, the ensuing emotional response to that felling and to the early arrest that followed, cast a cruel and urgent light upon the relationship between young people and the natural world which no reader can afford to ignore.
And this is a time slip novel with a difference. Rather than Molly visiting the past, it is the terrified Martha who has stepped through a portal as she flees the Newcastle of 1649. This is the Newcastle riven with fear, suspicion and societal condemnation of anyone who lives outside its norms; the Newcastle of the witch-trials, where Martha’s mother, the real-life Ann Watson, is among the women condemned to die.
With compassionate lightness of touch, suitable for a YA audience, Reed explores what those largely-forgotten witch-trials entailed, the violent calumny of the Scottish witch-pricker hired by the Puritan magistrates who held sway in predominantly Royalist Newcastle to satisfy the townspeople’s thirst for someone upon whom to fix blame for their combined harrowing by plague, civil war and the killing of their king.
Her narrative reflects both the enshrined othering of women and current thinking on how and why so many came to be charged with witchcraft: that the very nature of female occupation exposed them to the risk of accusation whenever milk soured, infants failed to thrive, or ailments worsened.2 Ann Watson, the real victim chosen to be Martha’s mother in Reed’s fictionalised account, is depicted as a ‘cunning woman,’ a purveyor of herbal remedies in her own time, just as Molly’s Nan is in ours.
By recalling with crystalline clarity the first weeks of the Covid pandemic in Britain — that near-dystopian time of fear, panic-buying and rumours — and holding them up to the mirror of the seventeenth century’s repeated outbreaks of endemic plague, Reed immerses us in the collective trauma of both periods. In The Rewilding, Ann and Martha have survived the pestilence (which history tells us raged ‘like wildfire’) due to Ann’s knowledge and skill, but it’s that very skill which will be Ann’s undoing. And even as Nan distributes homemade remedies to neighbours in her village in the spring of 2020, local gossip turns against her for being ‘different’. More dangerously, a spirit of vengeance also fixes upon the rough sleeper in the woods, and when Grandad sickens and local bigotry turns to violence, Molly confronts the most important lessons of all. By learning to stand up for others, she learns how to stand up for herself.
The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn is a book for feminists of all ages, for those who already understand the significance of nature and for those who aren’t really sure; for those who know the value of history’s lessons and for those who doubt that value. It deserves a place within the canon of Covid literature. And with Hallowe’en almost upon us, it serves as a well-structured and accessible reminder that we, in the developed world, continue to inhabit an anthropocentric, patriarchal society, where the same prejudices and culture of blame which led to innocent women being condemned to die as witches in the past are in essence still with us today.
These poor souls never confessed anything, but pleaded innocence.
Ralph Gardiner, England’s Grievance Discovered (1655)
Elizabeth Anderson
Elizabeth Brown
Margaret Brown
Matthew Bulmer
Jane Copeland
Katherine Coultor
Elizabeth Dobson
Elianor Henderson
Alice Hume
Jane Hunter
Margaret Maddison
Jane Martin
Margaret Muffit
Mary Potts
Elianor Rogerson
Ann Watson
This book was sent to me in exchange for an honest review.
The solitary man hanged at Newcastle was a butcher by trade. For an in-depth examination of this topic, I suggest Carter, Philippa. 2023. ‘Work, gender and witchcraft in early modern England.’ Gender & History 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12717
I could not ask for a finer review of my novel, The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn. Many, many, thanks to The Unhurried Reader for this considered and astute review that goes in depth into why I wrote this tale 'for feminists everywhere' that honours the name of Ann Watson and those murdered on accusations of witchcraft, and tells us, it is okay to be different.
What a fabulously thoughtful, beautifully written review.