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WoGF Review: A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
Rhonda Knight is a frequent contributor to WWEnd through her many reviews and her excellent blog series Automata 101 and Outside the Norm. Ronda is an Associate Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, SC. She teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as well as composition courses.
Somewhere online I read that A Discovery of Witches is “Harry Potter for adults.” Similarly, I described the book to a relative as “Twilight for smart people.” (Since I’ve never read any of the Twilight series, I’ll accept any of the invective that you want to pile on for my snobbery). However, a book like this will inevitably be compared to these two behemoths of popular culture. Magic? Check. A brooding vampire? Check. A forbidden romance? Check. A movie deal in the works? Check.
Deborah Harkness freely admits that the current magic-and-vampire craze inspired her to write A Discovery of Witches. She remembers walking through an airport bookstore and wondering if there are witches and vampires, what do they all do for a living? In response to that question, she gives us Diana Bishop, a Yale history professor and the last of a long line of American witches, and Matthew Clairmont, a neuroscientist, a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and a vampire. Diana Bishop, in response to a childhood trauma, vows to give up all magic and buries herself in her research. Significantly, she researches early alchemical manuscripts, trying to show “how scientific this pursuit really was” (10). Her belief is that “[a]lchemy tells us about the growth of experimentation, not the search for a magical elixir that turns lead into gold and makes people immortal” (10).
