My only wish after finishing Of Sorrow and Such was that it had been infinitely longer.
Less than a hundred pages long, Angela Slatter‘s fantasy novella weaves a tale flawlessly told, rife with traditional and beloved markers of fantasy: there are hedge witches and grimoires and shape shifters and familiars and even a touch of necromancy. What is so delicious and captivating about this tale is that it brings a decidedly feminist perspective to the fantasy genre: it’s told through the lens of Patience Gideon.
Patience Gideon, who is Patience Sykes in Slatter’s collection Sourdough and Other Stories, is the tenacious woman who the townspeople of Edda’s Meadow turn to for their everyday remedies. From saving their children from fever to making their “barren wombs a little more welcoming for their husbands’ seed,” Patience Gideon is the town healer, sought out even in the midst of conventional physician Doctor Herbeau’s visits to Edda’s Meadow. What the townspeople fail to realize, however, is that Patience Gideon is secretly a hedge witch; her remedies are rooted in magic.
We are introduced to Patience Gideon when she is gathering waterweed from Edda’s Bath, a pond in the town with a river running through it. Using “the sight that was [her] dead father’s gift,” she peers down through the water, to the bottom, where a swaddled bundle lies. She sees a newborn, “weighted down with rocks”:
No point in telling anyone; they’d want to know how I knew about it and answering that question would only lead to more queries best left unasked. Whoever put it here will torment themselves quite sufficiently. Besides, how am I the one to judge a woman who leaves a child behind?
The opening scene sets the stage for the themes that will arise in the telling of Patience Gideon’s tale: motherhood and what it means to be a mother, abandonment, suppressed identity, judgment, and justice. Moreover, this opening scene reveals the depths of Patience Gideon’s unsentimental empathy. She is keen to uncovering secrets; she is keen to smelling the “sour breast milk, untapped and curdling” on the woman who abandoned the child in Edda’s Bath, who now binds her breasts to keep them from leaking. Patience Gideon keeps these secrets with her, revealing them only when absolutely necessary. She never compromises the woman for whom keeping these secrets safe means survival, thus establishing a camaraderie with her fellow women–even with those who don’t deserve it.
While she usually lives with her adopted, non-magical teenage daughter Gilly and her beloved dog Fenric, Patience Gideon also makes her spacious home available to witches who seek a temporary respite from their travels. And sometimes, she’s visited by other magical beings who are in desperate need of her magic. Late one night, long after midnight has come and gone, a panicked woman, her right hand detached from her wrist, appears on Patience Gideon’s doorstep. Patience Gideon knows her magic alone cannot heal this woman; she is fortunate to have Selke, a fellow witch, temporarily occupying her home. Selke’s powers are rooted in magic similar to necromancy, and it is with this dark magic that she heals the distraught woman’s hand, by making an entirely new one out of “’gravedust and silver shavings amongst other things.’” Patience Gideon is simultaneously amazed and a bit jealous of her houseguest’s talents.
This good deed soon becomes a mistake, for the woman who gains the new hand is Flora Brautigan. A shape shifter–or “shifter” as they are called in this mythos–Flora is as stubborn as she is stupid. After Selke heals her, Flora will carelessly ensnare the two witches that helped her in a rabid witchhunt, a witchhunt whose nexus quickly becomes Patience Gideon, for she is one of the most revered and powerful women in her little town.
The fear of the powerful woman is another prominent theme that arises in this text, and perhaps the most important. It is a theme prevalent throughout history and famously recognized in the context of the Salem witch trials, when any woman possessing independence or intelligence was in danger of being suspected and hanged as a witch. A woman becomes powerful when she is independent because she does not need a man; thus, she becomes a threat. She is powerful when she is in control of her own choices and when she is in control of her own body. The men of Edda’s Meadow recoil when they realize Patience Gideon is powerful in all of these ways, and they attempt to use violence to suppress her throughout her imprisonment. This rhetoric, lest we forget, often permeates our modern society.
This is why Of Sorrow and Such is an important tale of modern fantasy. It embraces the magic of the genre while giving it a necessary update, all the while maintaining gorgeous prose. Of Sorrow and Such evokes the bygone, the dark, and the mythical, but its strength lies in empowering characters once viewed as secondary.
