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Summary
Summary
The Daylight Gate , an instant bestseller in the UK, is award-winning Jeanette Winterson's singular vision of a dark period of complicated morality, sex, and tragic plays for power in a time when politics and religion were closely intertwined.
After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, every Catholic conspirator in England fled to a wild, untamed place far from the reach of London law. On Good Friday, 1612, deep in the woods of Pendle Hill, amid baptismal pools and low, thick fog, a gathering of thirteen is interrupted by the local magistrate. Two of their coven have already been imprisoned for witchcraft and are awaiting trial, but those who remain are vouched for by the wealthy and respected Alice Nutter.
Shrouded in mystery and gifted with eternally youthful beauty, Alice is established in Lancashire society and insulated by her fortune. Yet she is also plagued by rumors of a dark and torrid love affair with another woman, the matriarch of the notorious Demdike clan. As those accused of witchcraft retreat into darkness, Alice stands alone as a realm-crosser, a conjurer of powers that will either destroy her or set her free.
Author Notes
Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959 and graduated from St. Catherine's College, Oxford.
Her book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is a semi-autobiographical account of her life as a child preacher (she wrote and gave sermons by the time she was eight years old). The book was the winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction and was made into an award-winning TV movie. The Passion won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for best writer under thirty-five, and Sexing the Cherry won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
To open The Daylight Gate is to be thrust into an England most Americans will have trouble believing ever existed. It's a wild, superstitious place where the king (James I, Protestant son of the very Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots) has minions who prosecute (and, arguably, persecute) people suspected of witchcraft or Catholicism. Winterson starts with the historical record-the 1612 Lancashire Witch Trial really happened-and adds poetry, possibility, Shakespeare, Elizabethan Magus John Dee, a sexy priest on the run, a lifelong love between two women, and best of all, her version of real-life accused witch Alice Nutter. Using the fact that Nutter was from a different class than the group she was tried and executed with, Winterson creates a character straight out of fantasy. Alice is vividly beautiful, suspiciously young-looking, and while not a witch herself, acquainted with what witches call the "Left-Hand Path," having worked with Dee on his alchemy and seen her female lover sell her soul to the devil, here called "the Dark Gentleman." Disliked for her power and fearlessness-she rides astride and harbors suspected witches on her land-when the hunts for Catholics and witches converge, so too do her past and present. The book is short, violent (both torture and magic are depicted with full goriness), and absorbing. The language is simple and sometimes lovely, and to say that the book could have gone the extra mile and been a graphic novel is not to damn it, but to recognize the pleasure in its intensely visual qualities. Agent: Heather Schroder, ICM. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Pendle: a place synonymous with witches and Britain's most notorious diabolism trials. The candle-passing parlour game says, if it dies in your hand, you've a forfeit to give. If you're going to write a book about famous witches, it had better fly. Winterson's novella is set in 1612, during the feverishly paranoid reign of James I. It describes the plight of a group of paupers, mostly women, accused of evil practices and tried at the August assizes. In the previous decade, the gunpowder plot almost did away with the king. Heresy is his obsession. Author of the instructive Daemonologie, he is, as Pendle's local magistrate puts it, "a meddler". In this fraught climate disfigured elderly ladies aren't safe, alchemists can be arrested for creating mechanical beetles, and Catholics are thumb-screwed. "It suits the times to degrade the hoc est corpus of the Catholic mass into satanic hocus pocus," notes William Shakespeare, who features briefly, and not preposterously, in Winterson's book. Outlawed beliefs have been dangerously elided. "Popery witchery, witchery popery," Thomas Potts, recording clerk for the prosecution and the crown, is fond of chanting. Potts arrives in Lancashire, one of the wildest corners of the country, desperate to preside over a trial as sensational as North Berwick, where the sorcerers responsible for the king's shipwreck were prosecuted. He stakes out Pendle Hill, a landscape of moors and mists, mossy baptismal pools and forests, ready to accost beldames on their broomsticks. So it comes to pass. A coven of aggrieved relatives meets in a remote tower on Good Friday for a mutton supper and to orchestrate the escape from Lancaster prison of their grand-dam, Old Demdike, who is suspected of sinister crimes. They conduct blood rituals. Into the fray rides Alice Nutter, astride rather than sidesaddle. A noble widow who owns Malkin Tower, she's implicated in the proceedings after the group is confronted by the authorities. Alice is a different kettle of fish from the rabble. Having made her fortune with a magenta dye and a royal warrant from the previous monarch, she's fiercely independent, and prone to charitable acts and harbouring fugitives. She's also mysterious, a realm-crosser. Strangely youthful though old, crackling with erotic appeal and a lover to both sexes, Alice is the kind of woman who makes Potts "feel less important than he knew himself to be". That the story is predetermined does little to dry up the narrative suspense. Winterson's version has all the grisly freshness of a newly exhumed graveyard corpse. Hangings and burnings are coming, but along the way there are revelations, plot twists, celebrities and trysts all very bold inventions. The narrative voice is irrefutable; this is old-fashioned storytelling, with a sermonic tone that commands and terrifies. It's also like courtroom reportage, sworn witness testimony. The sentences are short, truthful and dreadful. "Tom Peeper raped Sarah Device. He was quick. He was in practice." Absolutism is Winterson's forte, and it's the perfect mode to verify supernatural events when they occur. You're not asked to believe in magic. Magic exists. A severed head talks. A man is transmogrified into a hare. The story is stretched as tight as a rack, so the reader's disbelief is ruptured rather than suspended. And if doubt remains, the text's sensuality persuades. Teeth raining from the sky into Alice's lap click and patter like pebbles. A mouth painted on to a door feels soft as a lip, because it is a lip, momentarily. There's a forensic quality to the paranormal manifestations smells, lesions, blood that convinces, horribly. Occasionally, the daylight gate as a descriptive phrase becomes repetitious. By virtue of titular importance it's the most potent incantation, and could perhaps have been used more sparingly. The usual witchy tropes are present warts, cauldrons, familiars but they are upgraded, made suitable and sensible. If a toadstool features it's because Old Demdike knows which ones growing in prison are edible. Enchanted mirrors are by-products of mercury experimentation in laboratories. To avoid clichéd associations would be coy. Winterson would rather take these motifs on, activate and invigorate them. And she knows where true horror lies. Not in fantastical dimensions, but in the terrestrial world. Most grotesque and curdling are the visceral depictions of early 17th-century Britain the squalor, inequality and religious eugenics. The subjugation of women and prostituting of children. The degloving and castration of Catholics. Poverty. Sickness. Desperation. As well as being a gripping gothic read, the book provides historical social commentary on the phenomenon of witchcraft and witchcraft persecution. Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power. If you are king and have nearly drowned in a conjured storm, why not expunge the old practices from your sovereignty? If an ugly woman's pet has mauled your leg, duck her in the river to reveal her true identity. If you are destitute, starving, with nothing to lose but your soul, a deal with the Dark Gentleman may be a very attractive prospect. If you believe in such things. Jeanette Winterson will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 20 August. Sarah Hall's The Beautiful Indifference is published by Faber. This article was amended on 20 August because the wrong Sarah Hall had been credited with writing it. It is indeed by the author of The Beautiful Indifference and not the former senior Guardian correspondent of the same name. Apologies to both.
Kirkus Review
Witchcraft in 17th-century England: from the prolific British author (The Stone Gods, 2008, etc.), a nightmarish novella that burns like a hot coal. It was a notorious trial. The Lancashire Witches were tried and executed in 1612. England was jittery. The Protestant king, James I, was intent on hunting down witches and Catholics. The Gunpowder Plot had been a close call; all the Catholic plotters had fled north to Lancashire. Winterson uses the historical framework, grafting her inventions onto it. Entering the past with her is like walking through an open door. You are there. It is a world of rape and pillage. The most conspicuous witches are the Demdikes, a fearsome family of wretched indigents. The gentlewoman Alice Nutter, wealthy from inventing a dye, lets them live in a grim tower on her land. It is Good Friday. The Demdikes are planning a Black Mass. It is Alice's misfortune to be at the tower when the magistrate arrives. All of them, save Alice, are placed under guard. Alice does not believe in witchcraft, but she does believe in magic, which flickers throughout the narrative. Thirty years before, in London, she had known the alchemist John Dee and the beautiful Elizabeth Southern, one of her two great loves. Then Elizabeth sold her soul to the Dark Gentleman, but Alice stayed young, thanks to Dee's Elixir of Life. Now she is in danger, for her other great love, the Catholic plotter Southworth, has materialized at her house. The magistrate offers a deal: Give up Southworth and go free, or be tried as a witch with the others. Alice refuses, sealing her fate. As the tension mounts, Winterson weaves into her story a voodoo doll stuck with pins and an eerie meeting on haunted Pendle Hill between Alice and the dead John Dee. There will be torture and false testimony. An electrifying entertainment.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Winterson's novels tend to be complex and invigorating. She excels at creating provocative and satirical meshes of tradition and innovation, as in her many-faceted riff on Robinson Crusoe in The Stone Gods (2008). But here wizardly Winterson hones her storytelling to a dagger's point in an eviscerating variation on the epochal 1612 English witch trials in haunted Lancaster, a Catholic stronghold under James I, the new Protestant king. Like a witch over a cauldron, Winterson mixes historical figures (including William Shakespeare) with invented characters as she portrays a coven of horribly abused women and their starving, sexually exploited children, a desperate clan bravely defended by the mysterious and refined Alice Nutter. Wealthy, accomplished, and strangely ageless, Alice lives in solitary splendor, trusting only her falcon, and refuses to be intimated by the puffed-up witch-hunting lawyer, Thomas Potts, or the handsome, wily magistrate, Roger Nowell. But why does Alice risk all for the hideous crone, Old Demdike? Winterson summons up with forensic detail seventeenth-century filth, defilement, and torture while also conjuring occult forces and diabolical events. The result is a gripping tale of bloody religious persecution and brutal oppression of women and children, a heady and seething novel of fact, valor, magick, and love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MANY READERS of Jeanette Winterson's new novel will already have traveled with her to 17th-century England in her 1990 novel "Sexing the Cherry." Like most of Winterson's work, that early book is brief, copious and sometimes astonishing - Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion" meets "Naked Lunch." In "The Daylight Gate," Winterson now puts her mind to the Pendle Hill witch trials of 1612, whose 400th anniversary has occasioned a small outpouring of fiction and poetry. The potential for widespread witchcraft hysteria was almost certainly greater in Britain than it would have been here in America at the time of Salem, 80 years later. King James I, the author of a book called "Daemonologie," believed that he himself had been targeted by witches. And eager-to-please lawyers like Thomas Potts, who drew up a report on the Pendle Hill trials, knew the highest authorities would be gratified by any connection made between black magic and the crown's other, even greater, fear - "Witchery popery popery witchery" is how Winterson has Potts pronounce the link, almost as if he too were casting a spell. Alice Nutter, a prosperous widow, was perhaps the most respectable and least flamboyant of the defendants, and in making her the protagonist of "The Daylight Gate," Winterson forthrightly acknowledges that "my Alice Nutter is not the Alice Nutter of history." Indeed, in Winterson's hands, Alice gains a bisexual glamour and a checkered career: she's the inventor of a magenta dye that attracted Queen Elizabeth's favor and a participant in alchemical studies conducted by the astrologer-scientist-philosopher John Dee. It is as part of Dee's circle that Winterson's Alice becomes erotically entangled with Elizabeth Southern - the eventual matriarch of the accused witches - as well as with the Devil himself. But Alice has long since rejected the "Left-Hand Path" to perdition and become a figure of imposing rationality: a falconer who rides "astride" instead of sidesaddle, smites local louts with her riding crop and takes a kind of economic-feminist view of the reputed witchcraft problem "If they think they are witches does that make them so?" she asks. "Such women are poor. They are ignorant. They have no power in your world, so they must get what power they can in theirs. I have sympathy for them." Alice's preternaturally youthful looks come not so much from anything diabolical as from an advance in moisturizing, the "Elixir of Youth" she was given by John Dee. She confides this beauty secret to Christopher Southworth, a Jesuit priest who has been in love with her since he was 18. The ardor is mutual, and Alice is now hiding Southworth, supposedly tortured for his participation in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot against the king, on her Lancashire estate. When his crucifix is found in Alice's bed, popery joins witchery in the ring of suspicions tightening around her. During a bit of Jacobean plea bargaining, Elizabeth Device, daughter of Elizabeth Southern, will soon be fingering Alice for a witch. The local justice of the peace, Roger Nowell, is struggling with both his dislike of King James and his own new inclination to believe in witchcraft. (Having fallen sick after the defendants punctured a little effigy of him, he's got his reasons.) A historical figure whose biography seems to have been embroidered somewhat less than the also-real Southworth's, Nowell, a widower with considerable respect for Alice, will let her go if she agrees to tell him where he can find the priest. Winterson is always a grand conjurer of ghoulish effects, sometimes backlighting them with visible merriment over her own excesses. The dungeons in this new book offer her fine opportunities: a room "piled with rats about three feet deep, eating each other"; a talking spider; a boiled head into which someone else's tongue has been sewn. A reader of "The Daylight Gate" - whose title refers to "the liminal hour" between day and night - will be vastly more entertained by it than some earlier treatments of the subject, notably William Harrison Ainsworth's 1849 novel "The Lancashire Witches," a heavy-footed production that requires cameos by Robin Hood to keep the reader awake. But Ainsworth's book is a pretty low fence for Winterson's broom to clear, and one sometimes senses that she's suffering from in-flight boredom. However delightfully gruesome that boiled head may be, the author's inventions here are never so arresting as the search, in her early novel "The Passion," for a character's actual stolen heart, or the wonderful appearance, in "Sexing the Cherry," of balloon-borne sweepers who must clean the sky of all the spoken words that cling to it like soot. Winterson's regular readers are accustomed to sudden changes in voice and point of view that announce themselves with nothing more than a line break, but in this new book dialogue can be weighted down with the chores of exposition, recap and underlining: '"You are stubborn,' said Roger Nowell. 'I am not tame,' said Alice Nutter." On a trip to London - usually a chance for Winterson to go to town in every sense - she's scarcely got the energy to place a predicate among the obligatory nouns: "Inns, taverns, bakers, cookshops, men and women smoking clay pipes carrying fish baskets on their heads." In "A Work of My Own," included in a collection of essays called "Art Objects," Winterson insists that literature be created in a heightened language and that narrative alternate temperate stretches with storms of poetic compression. "In my own fiction," she declares, "I try to drive together lyric intensity and breadth of ideas." Any reader of her work knows the extraordinary extent to which she's made good on this effort. But with the exception of a dazzlement here and a dazzlement there - the "fatty light" making its way into a cell, the eyes that "shine like fireflies in the waste ground" of a prisoner's body - the language of "The Daylight Gate" doesn't billow with much frequency or surprise. Alice remains an appealing figure, a mature and stately version of other Winterson sorceresses, someone who has experienced both the magic of magic and the magic of science. "I think we are worlds compressed into human form," she tells John Dee, as if anticipating the modern particle physics found in Winterson's "Gut Symmetries." But listen to how the heroine of that extraordinary novel, a woman who knows something about "lyric intensity," puts it: "What tales would they tell, those compressed mites. ... Breathe, all powerful one, and vanquish kingdoms as you do. Your idiot nose has sucked up Rome. Your open mouth has spewed out the Thames." In a number of Winterson's books, there is a line insisting that "what you risk reveals what you value." Her generation of English writers doesn't contain anyone nervier or more gifted, but this latest book is less risky, less witchy, than her regular readers might have expected. In "A Work of My Own," she explains her determination "to make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," something so new that she can assert, with an element of truth, "I do not write novels." That, however, is what she has done, pleasurably, with "The Daylight Gate." For almost anyone else, it would be quite good enough. ? In Winterson's hands, a woman accused of witchcraft gains a bisexual glamour. THOMAS MALLON is the author, most recently, of "Watergate: A Novel" and "Yours Ever: People and Their Letters."
Library Journal Review
This short novel brings to life 17th-century England during the reign of James I at the Pendle witch trials in 1612. The presence of witchcraft is clear, and Satan appears briefly, yet the accusations against 13 women are highly politicized, much like the Salem witch trials of 1692 in America. The protagonist is Alice Nutter (a real-life victim who was recently honored with a statue in the Lancashire village of Roughlee, her home before she was taken to Lancaster Castle to be tried), who speaks up for the condemned and finds herself facing charges. As we learn more about Alice's history, we see how a great past love she experienced has and will cost her dearly. The story of Alice's affair with another woman is erotic and gripping, and the story's supernatural elements are intriguing. Alice is a complex character with a big heart, a woman who embraces her sexuality and stands up against the powerful. This is a suspenseful, disturbing novel about passion, injustice, sacrifice, and bravery in the face of hideous torture and execution. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Winterson, an eclectic British writer whose first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel. Those with a fascination for this dark era in history will be eager to read. [See Prepub Alert, 4/15/13.]-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.