The (Re)imagined Shades of Alice Gray: The Counter-Memory of a Woman-as-Witch in Stacey Halls’ <i>The Familiars</i> (2019)

Historical fiction is a way of dealing with painful pasts and traumatic events as counter-memories. Long-forgotten events are (re)created in a safe space in historical fiction. Set in seventeenth-century Lancashire, in her modern historical fiction The Familiars (2019), Stacey Halls narrates Alice Gray’s painful past as a woman-as-witch into existence. Halls achieves it by (re)imagining Alice Gray’s plight within the historical context of the Pendle Hill witch-hunt in 1612 Lancashire. Not only does Halls give Alice her historical voice back, but she sets the historical record straight by counter-memorialising Alice Gray as a woman-as-witch, i.e., a seventeenth-century woman othered and presumed to practise witchcraft, in this instance, merely for being an impoverished unmarried woman and a midwife. In this way, Halls’s narrative invites us to empathise with Alice’s plight, to understand the injustices she faced, and to appreciate her resilience. Besides, (re)creating Alice’s witchcraft story, Halls fleshes out her heart-wrenching emotional turmoil. Moving away from the cold historical recorded facts, Halls interweaves Alice’s troubled personal past as an abused young woman and a grieving and loving stepmother with the unfortunate contemporary events of the Pendle Hill witch hunt. As a result, we are offered a more than plausible (re)imagined rationale for Alice’s witch hunt predicament and acquittal, which cannot be found or is even hinted at in the historical records. Thus, Halls culturally endows Alice’s seventeenth-century marginalised historical counterpart with a contemporary gender-empowered mnemonic (re)imagined counter-memory. Moreover, Hall’s active remembering of Alice Gray politically (re)contextualises and (re)frames this woman-as-witch of the Pendle Hill witch hunt of 1612 previously wanting. Also, the (re)imagined counter-memory of Alice Gray challenges the dominant historical narrative and underscores historical fiction’s power in reshaping our understanding of the past. Ultimately, Halls endears and humanises this woman-as-witch of Pendle Hill and provides us with the many shades of Alice Gray.