The Once and Future Witches

Three Sisters in New Salem

The Eastwood sisters have not spoken in seven years. Juniper, the youngest, ran from her father’s farm after something happened that the novel slowly reveals. Agnes, the middle sister, has built a careful life in the city, hiding what she is. Bella, the eldest, has built a different careful life in the library, hiding what she knows.

What they all are is witches — bearers of the remnants of an old tradition of women’s magic that has been suppressed for centuries. What brings them back together is a convergence of forces: the resurgence of something old in the city, the rise of the suffragist movement, and the arrival of a man who wants to use both against them.

Alix E. Harrow’s second novel is an immersion in the 1890s American city: its labour politics, its race dynamics, its gender constraints, its newspaper culture, its specific physical texture. The research is worn lightly but it is everywhere — in the vernacular, the settings, the specific social conventions that structure what the Eastwood sisters can and cannot do.

The Magic

The magic in The Once and Future Witches is not systemic in the way that contemporary fantasy tends to make magic: not a set of rules and limits precisely defined, not a power that operates according to consistent mechanics. It is older and stranger than that — words and will and knowledge that survives in the spaces where official history didn’t bother to look: in fairy tales, in nursery rhymes, in the remedies women passed to each other when the men weren’t listening.

This is a specific claim about what magic is: not power taken from outside but knowledge recovered from the margins. The analogy to women’s history is not obscure. The things that the patriarchal order has suppressed — ways of knowing, ways of relating to the natural world, practices of care and remedy and community — are the things that constitute the old magic. Destroying them has made everyone poorer.

The Suffragist Movement

The novel is set in the context of the women’s suffrage movement, which is rendered with historical accuracy including its internal conflicts. The suffragist organisations of the 1890s were in significant ways compromised: the mainstream movement was dominated by white middle-class women who excluded or marginalised Black women, working-class women, and immigrant women from their organisations and their vision of enfranchisement.

Harrow does not airbrush this. The Eastwood sisters encounter the suffragist movement’s exclusions directly — and the question of what “women’s liberation” means when it is defined to include some women and exclude others is live in the novel throughout. This is what separates The Once and Future Witches from simpler feminist fantasy: it takes the complexity of liberation movements seriously rather than presenting an idealised united sisterhood.

The Three Sisters

Juniper, Agnes, and Bella Eastwood are the novel’s great achievement, and each is as fully realised as the others.

Juniper is fire: impulsive, fierce, driven by anger at injustice into action that is sometimes brilliant and sometimes catastrophic. She is the easiest to love and the most difficult to be close to.

Agnes is earth: steady, pragmatic, carrying a secret that is slowly revealed — she is pregnant, by a man she cannot trust, in a society that will punish her for it. Her story is the novel’s most contemporary-feeling, in the sense that her specific circumstances — the impossible choices available to a woman who wants more than what she is allowed — feel continuous with conversations that haven’t ended.

Bella is air: intellectual, careful, the keeper of the sisters’ shared knowledge. Her arc involves the specific experience of a woman who has spent her life in the library — absorbing knowledge that belongs officially to men, developing expertise she cannot publicly claim, surviving by making herself useful to institutions that don’t fully acknowledge her.

What the Novel Argues

The analogy at the heart of The Once and Future Witches — between the historical persecution of women accused of witchcraft and the structural suppression of women more broadly — is not subtle, and it is not meant to be. But Harrow is a careful enough thinker to ensure that the analogy is grounded rather than sentimental. The novel knows that witch-hunting was also racial persecution, class persecution, the persecution of people who represented threats to social order in multiple overlapping ways. The feminist dimension is real; it is not the whole story.

This honesty is what makes the novel’s feminist argument more rather than less persuasive.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — Richly realised historical fantasy with genuine political depth. The sisters are three of fantasy’s best recent protagonists.