It is 1612, Fleetwood Shuttleworth is 17 years old, married, and pregnant for the fourth time. She has yet to have a living child and there is no heir for her husband, which he so desperately craves. But fate leads her to cross paths with a young girl, Alice Grey a midwife who promises Fleetwood that she will assist her to give birth to a healthy boy. But Alice is unwittingly drawn into the murky world of witchcraft accusations, and it seems that her and Fleetwood’s future is threatened and indeed that of the baby that has yet to be born.
Stacey Halls using the history of the Pendle witches as a clever black drop to tell this intriguing story of two woman from very different worlds. Fleetwood initially is painted as a young girl who has seemingly been married off to a rich man by a cold and unloving mother. The reader is taken on her journey, spurred initially by the desire to have a healthy child but then an unexpected loyalty to the only friend she has ever known changes her world. The story of Alice is just as compelling, a young woman thwited by her social standing and unwittingly caught up in the suspicions of witchcraft.
The novel captures the spirit of the age. How England was caught up in a furry of suspicion, spurred by powerful men, who often used these trials as a way of carrying favour with the king. She also gives us an interesting insight on how woman in society were often at the mercy of men, either as vessels to produce children to carry on a family name, or as scrap goats for the misfortunes of others.
I enjoyed how the character of Fleetwood grew. Initially a young married woman who will stop at nothing to produce an heir for her husband. She gradually realises that her husband is not the saviour she thought and the mother whom she presumes despises her is not the villain she initially paints her as.
The familiars is a story of women finding their voice and indeed their own kind of freedom, in a world very much dominated by what society thinks and its suspicion of their sex.