Good Witch by Lucianne Tonti

Moving between history, cultural criticism, memoir and manifesto, Lucianne Tonti’s Good Witch is an ambitious work of feminist nonfiction. Its central argument is that the figure of the witch has long carried the anxieties of patriarchal societies: fear of women’s knowledge, suspicion of female autonomy, discomfort with bodies, nature, care, gossip, age and healing. By tracing that figure from the European and North American witch hunts to the present, Tonti asks what was lost when women’s practices were recast as threats, and what might still be recovered.

The book is strongest when it refuses to treat the ‘witch’ as a simple symbol of empowerment. Tonti is alert to the violence behind the image. The women accused, tried and killed were not metaphorical witches in pointed hats, but real people caught in systems of fear, theology, property, politics and gendered control. Her discussion of King James and the spread of witch-hunting belief gives the historical material a clear narrative drive, while the broader movement across England, Scotland, Salem and northern Europe helps prevent the book from reducing the subject to its most familiar American example.

What distinguishes Good Witch from a straightforward history is the way Tonti connects this past to contemporary life. She is interested in disenchantment: the gradual stripping away of communal knowledge, domestic skill, ecological intimacy and embodied wisdom. This is where her earlier work on fashion, fibres and sustainability becomes relevant. Tonti’s concern with how modern systems separate people from materials, labour and the natural world gives the book a distinctive ecological dimension. The witch, in this reading, becomes a way of thinking about women’s work, earth-based knowledge and the politics of care.

The personal sections give the argument warmth and accessibility. Tonti writes with wit and conviction, and the book benefits from the sense of a writer thinking through her own inheritance rather than simply presenting research from a distance. The interviews and contemporary examples broaden the scope, showing how practices once dismissed or demonised are being reclaimed by women in different forms.

There are moments, however, when the book’s reach exceeds its depth. Its large claims about patriarchy, capitalism, environmental damage and spiritual disconnection are persuasive in broad outline, but some readers may want a more sustained engagement with race, colonialism and the uneven ways these histories have affected women across cultures. A book so concerned with power would be stronger when its intersections are explored with the same force as its central feminist argument.

Even so, Good Witch is lively, intelligent and often stirring. It succeeds because it treats the witch not as an aesthetic trend or lifestyle shorthand, but as a historical wound and a political possibility. Tonti writes about what has been devalued: women’s knowledge, mutual care, reverence for the natural world, and ways of living that resist extraction and control. Her book does not pretend these can be restored simply by naming them. It does, however, make a compelling case that recovery begins by recognising how much was deliberately diminished.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Simon & Schuster