The Once and Future Witches

About The Once and Future Witches

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow is a novel of magic, sisterhood, and radical politics set in the 1890s American suffrage movement - a book that asks what witchcraft and women's liberation have always had in common, and answers that question with fury and grace. Published in 2020, it is a work of historical fantasy at its most ambitious and most human. Three estranged sisters - Juniper, Agnes, and Bella Eastwood - are reunited in the fictional city of New Salem when Juniper, the youngest and most impulsive, accidentally performs a piece of forgotten women's magic during a suffrage rally. What she awakens draws the attention of the city's hidden witches, its hostile establishment, and a mysterious force of institutional evil that has been systematically erasing women's magic and women's stories for centuries. Harrow uses the three sisters as distinct lenses on the period's tensions. Juniper is anger and impulse, the sister most willing to burn things down. Agnes is pragmatism and survival, protecting the secret she carries. Bella is scholarship and caution, the sister most connected to the book's central preoccupation with lost histories and hidden power. Their reunion and reconciliation - the work of healing old wounds while new ones are being opened - is the novel's emotional engine. The magic system is built from fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and the scraps of knowledge that women preserved when no other form of power was available to them. Words are power; stories are power; the act of writing down what was meant to be forgotten is power. Harrow makes this feel true rather than merely metaphorical. The Once and Future Witches wears its politics openly - it is explicitly about who gets to make history and whose story gets told - and never allows those politics to calcify into polemic. It is too invested in its characters for that. An essential work of contemporary historical fantasy.

Tropes & Themes