Lucy M. Boston's witch Melanie Powers and Green Knowe revisited

The children's writer Lucy M. Boston, author of the Green Knowe series, has been featured in an article about her birthday and her memoirs. There are brief references to her witch Dr. Melanie Powers in a few other places, and some elements that this evil woman has in common with fellow fictional modern-day witch Miss Heckatty are described in the article about Linwood Sleigh's witches. 

I re-read An Enemy at Green Knowe recently, and, just as happened when I took another look at Beverley Nichols's books about the witch Miss Smith, I found some more material to comment on.

Starting with some coincidences

The main story begins when the boy Ping asks old Mrs Oldknow if she knows anything about a 17th-century man called Piers Madely. She says that this is odd, because she had been thinking about Madely earlier that day!

She tells the disturbing story of the good vicar Piers Madely and the unprepossessing occult scholar, alchemist and necromancer Dr. Vogel, whose evil books and manuscripts were all burned, to Ping and his friend Tolly, who is her great-grandson. The very next day, a letter arrives from a Dr. Melanie D. Powers enquiring about Dr. Vogel's collection!

Before the letter comes:

“The queer thing about Grand's stories," Tolly explained to Ping, "is that bits of them keep coming true now, although they are all so old.“

After the letter comes:

"There you are, Ping!" Tolly exclaimed. "Didn't I tell you part of Grand's stories always come true? She no sooner mentions Dr. Wolfgang Vogel than Dr. Melanie D. Powers comes asking about him."

Perhaps Mrs Oldknow had been thinking about Dr. Vogel because she subconsciously sensed that the letter was coming.

Lucy M. Boston, her birthday and her memoirs

The English novelist Lucy M. Boston, who is often known as L. M. Boston, was born on December 10th 1892. She was over 60 when her first book was published, and she lived to the age of 97.

She is of interest to me mainly because of her book An Enemy at Green Knowe. The enemy in the title is the scholar, black magician and demon-possessed witch Dr. Melanie Powers, who has been mentioned in passing in a few articles. This is the only book in which Lucy M. Boston writes at length about the battle between good and evil.

There is little in Lucy M. Boston’s life to explain where Melanie Powers and her very familiar characteristics and behaviour came from; unlike Nicholas Stuart Gray’s and Diana Wynne Jones’s witches, she was not based on the author’s mother: Lucy M. Boston’s mother was unhappy and neglectful, but not cruel and evil.

However, the magical house Green Knowe, whose name appears in the titles of her series of children’s fantasy books, is taken directly from Manor House, which was built by the Normans around the year 1130 and was her home for almost 50 years.

Manor House is still in the Boston family and is now open to the public. Maybe I will go to see it some time.

Perverse and Foolish

Lucy M. Boston’s autobiographical work Perverse and Foolish: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth describes her life up to the time of her marriage.

Linwood Sleigh’s witches: Miss Heckatty, Mother Withershins and Winnie Jago

The Boy in the Ivy by Linwood Sleigh is yet another very good book that I remembered as containing modern-day witches and wanted to re-read. It is out of print; when I first saw how much was being charged for the few copies available, I decided to forget it! After a long time, I felt a sudden impulse to search online once again just in case; I found a copy on Amazon at a very reasonable price. When the book arrived, I found that it had been signed by the author!

Three of the witches it contains are of especial interest to me.

Miss Heckatty

When she first appears, Miss Heckatty is presented as a selfish, inconsiderate, annoying character, a ‘horrid old lady’. She moves some items a boy left on a window seat on the train to reserve it and takes the seat for herself. She knits during the journey and keeps jabbing the boy beside her with her elbow. 

Miss Heckatty is a learned lady; just like Dr. Melanie Powers in L. M. Boston’s An Enemy at Green Knowe, she is the scholarly type of witch. She too is hunting something – an extremely rare flower with magic properties as opposed to occult papers. Also just like Melanie Powers, Miss Heckatty goes to tea with a family because it gives her a pretext to get into a place where she hopes to find what she is looking for. The visit provides opportunities to look around and do some investigating. Witches often have ulterior motives for what they do.

Miss Heckatty is greedy: she takes the biggest cakes, but unlike Dr. Powers she does this openly. She is unkind to her worn, miserable, downtrodden students.