During freshman week the new students are sent to the physical education department, told to undress, and photographed naked from three angles with small metal pins taped along their spines. It is described to them as a posture study. It has been done to every entering class since 1880, nobody will tell them where the negatives are kept, and the rumour going around the dormitories is that the photographs have nothing whatever to do with posture. One girl reports for it. The other refuses outright and is not punished, which turns out to be the first useful thing she teaches her roommate. The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman is a novel about a secret society of witches at Radcliffe College, and it is also, with unusual persistence, a novel about who is permitted to make decisions concerning a woman’s body.
The Rulebook Nobody Gave the Men
Every arriving Radcliffe student in 1950 receives a pamphlet the novel calls The Red Book. It is issued to women only.
It covers hemlines, curfews, gentlemen callers, where a woman may smoke and whether she may wear jeans in public. Women who insist on taking science courses may do so with the president’s approval and are then seated on chairs in the hallway outside the laboratory, on the grounds that their presence inside would distract the men. Married students with babies leave the prams on the ground floor and climb to the fourth, listening for crying through the stairwell.
None of this is invented, and The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman presents it without commentary, which is far more effective than outrage would have been. A group will find it hard to move past this section quickly. The detail that tends to stop people is the hallway chair: not exclusion, exactly, but admission on terms designed to be humiliating.
What Alice Hoffman Does With the Body
The magic in this novel is legible on the skin, and that is the point.
Witches here are marked. A sixth finger on the left hand. Blood that runs black. Teeth a little too sharp. One character was taken to a doctor as an infant and had the extra finger removed, and carries the scar; the other still has hers, and hides the hand. The mark is simultaneously the proof of power and the evidence for the prosecution, and the novel never lets those two things separate.
This is where a reading group can do real work. In 1692 the marks were searched for by men appointed to find them. In 1950 they are searched for by a camera, a physical education department and, later, a psychiatrist with a prescription pad. The instrument changes. The premise does not, and it is stated in every timeline The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman visits: a woman’s body is a document that other people are entitled to read.
Mrs. Healy’s Telephone Number
The most quietly devastating thread in The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman has no spells in it at all.
There is a midwife in Central Square whose family came over from Ireland and has always practised what the novel calls the Nameless Art, meaning women’s health. Her number circulates among Radcliffe students by word of mouth. Diaphragms are illegal for unmarried women. The pill is still being tested on rabbits in Harvard laboratories. A pregnant student chooses between expulsion and a hasty marriage. The ones who do not have the midwife’s number arrange to meet a stranger in Harvard Square, are blindfolded, and are driven to an office where somebody who may or may not be a doctor is waiting.
Hoffman lays out the legal history plainly: abortion was lawful in colonial Massachusetts before quickening, and the Comstock Act of 1873 ended that, partly at the urging of a medical profession that wanted reproduction taken out of the hands of midwives and cunning folk. In this state, the relevant statutes were filed under crimes against chastity, morality, decency and good order.
One of these cases ends badly on the page, and the scene is short, clinical and impossible to argue with.
Where The Witches of Cambridge Loses Control
Not everything here is as disciplined as that midwife’s parlour.
The villain is a cartoon. A predatory professor whose motives arrive in one late lump of explanation.
The narrator will not stop advising you. Italic second-person asides and a very high rate of pronouncements about love.
Coincidence carries the last act. Two or three of the closing joins are visible well before they land.
The men are sketched. The romantic lead is charming, largely absent, and forgiven faster than he earns.
None of these sink the book, and a group that has spent an hour on the photographs and the pamphlet will find it easy to forgive them. It is worth naming them anyway, because the flaws all sit on the same side of the ledger: whenever The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman turns from institutions to individual wickedness, it gets noticeably less interesting.
Questions Worth Bringing
The obvious one is about the photographs, and it is better than it looks. One character complies and one refuses, and the refusal costs nothing. Ask the group why compliance felt compulsory anyway, and where each of them has done the same arithmetic.
The harder question concerns the grandmother. She is not a villain in her own mind. She spends the novel trying to keep a girl safe, and every method she reaches for is a method for making her smaller: locked windows, silence, a doctor, a lie. Ask whether the group can name a woman in their own family who did something similar, and whether protection and control are distinguishable at all from the inside.
There is a third, and it may run longest. The 1692 sections of The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman are letters written to a reader the author of them will never meet. Ask what the group would put in such a letter, and who they picture opening it.
Groups that finish this should look at When We Flew Away, in which Hoffman writes a real teenage girl under an occupying government and allows herself no magic at all. The Witches of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo passes power down a family line and counts what it costs each generation. The Late-Night Witches by Auralee Wallace is warmer, funnier company on the same shelf. And Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen handles inherited female strangeness with a lighter touch and a comparable ache.
Final Thoughts
At the very end of the book there is a rose tree standing nine feet high outside a house at the edge of some old Cambridge farmland. It grew from a single cutting posted across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century by the mother of a man who did not survive the crossing back. The buds come up white. They open red.
That is the image The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman leaves a group holding. Not the hanging tree and not the laboratory, but a thing sent by one woman to another with no expectation of reply, which took root, which is still flowering three hundred years later, and which nobody in authority ever thought to look for.