Going to answer from a psychiatric standpoint. Lois part III #30 ‘Do you find the psychological patterns presented plausible? Does the story have any present day social application?’
This is what stood out at me the most in this book. Yes, I found the patterns very plausible. Hysterical group of females with a gang mentality is what comes to mind. This may sound harsh, but in real life it is present.
Think about you who have daughters. In middle school were they shunned for being different? Different as in what they liked, studied, did for pleasure, etc. Happens all the time- they are expected to conform to what is normal for the group around them or they are harassed, shunned, etc. This seems to improve as they get older in high school where it is more acceptable to be different.
You couldn’t pay me to repeat 7th grade. Thankfully, I eventually found a new group of friends and went somewhere completely different for high school.
Are we told how old Lois is? I figured her for 18ish because of thinking seriously about marriage, wow, looking it up they didn’t marry young. 26 was average age in the US in 1700. The real Salem witch trial accusers were between 9 and 20.
Lois, the Witch wasn’t a pleasant read. It reminded me, as others of you have mentioned, at times of The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter and The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
A time in history that I would like to forget ever existed but I suppose it serves as a good reminder of what harm can be done by thoughtless malice and ignorance masquerading as righteousness. Groups of pre-teen and young teen girls are just frightening.
Lois, herself, doesn’t show up in a great light — passively accepting that her life was going to end without even a token fight.
I do enjoy Elizabeth Gaskell’s writing but this story didn’t shine. I found some of the other stories in the collection were more interesting. Mercifully, this was a short story.
A Christmas Carol in the other hand was so much fun! Dickens is quite wordy and I find it tough to wade through his prose at times. But, this was just so perfectly written! The descriptions and turn of phrase were delicious. I found the preface so quaintly funny. I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
Maybe I missed it but did the book give a clear reason for Scrooge’s transformation into who he is at the time of the visitation? From the flashback with his erstwhile sweetheart, it seems that the lust for lucre just took over Scrooge to the extent that nothing else mattered.
The pairing made few connections for me, other than the times they write about. The best part of reading this pair was that we read two cbooks that together contained fewer than 200 pages. I’m in somewhat of a reading lull, because of some issues, but I hope to snap out if it soon.
ETA @mathmom I think Lois is eighteen, sometime in her last few hours she says something to that effect.
I read A Christmas Carol first and really enjoyed it. I can’t remember the last time I watched it and I’m not sure I ever read the real version. I think I only read the kid versions when I was a child.
I did not like Lois the Witch. It was painful to read. You had to trudge through all the misery before reaching the already expected outcome.
So far I’ve only read Lois the Witch and am sorry I did - left me really depressed. I guess I was naïve and hoping for a last minute rescue like in Outlander and many other shows. It was good writing though.
Gosh I think I’m the only one to like Lois the Witch but I did like it both as a cautionary note and a dip back in time. Funny that I didn’t find it painful to read but WWII books, especially those that focus on the Holocaust - I just can’t go there. For a while it seemed that my other two books clubs chose those books continually.
I haven’t read any Gaskell and, while I like Lois the Witch, I felt it probably isn’t her best work. I prefer a couple other stories in Curious, If True. And I still hope to tackle North and South eventually, probably because @Mary13 loves it so.
I am so glad that we read these stories. I was a bit sad when Lois died, because I too hoped that she would be saved at the end. I do plan to read the other stories in “Curious, if True”, but later.
I loved “A Christmas Carol”. I have loved the story since I was a child and saw the numerous movie and cartoon versions of the story. I saw recently that there have been about 130 different movies, cartoons and tv shows based on “A Christmas Carol”. Not a bad legacy, Charles.
The book that I read “A Christmas Carol” from was “Stories for Christmas” by Charles Dickens. I did not know that he had written so many Christmas stories. Two other longer stories were “The Chimes” and “The Cricket on the Hearth”. There are also about 15 short stories in the book.
The introduction of the book said that a contemporary of Dickens told him that "he should be happy “for you may be sure you have done more good by this little publication, fostered more kindly feelings, and prompted more positive acts of beneficence, than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom since Christmas, 1842"”.
@ignatius I liked The Old Nurse’s Story and The Poor Clare. I do enjoy the gothic so that’s part of the appeal. Curious, if True was amusing. It took me a while to get the point, though.
I had North and South as an audio book, but it just wasn’t working for me. I need to read it with my eyeballs. But I am determined to give it a go despite Lois!
I ordered Lois the Witch but am struggling to get through it. Entering a time full of zealous religious repression, misogyny, women foreclosed from autonomy on every level (and persecuted) is hard going! Just finding I’m resisting entering that zone.
Those aspects of society still exist so I can’t look back at the more intense, earlier versions without a shudder!
I was trying to think of something comparable in contemporary news, and it’s there on a smaller scale with incidents like the “Slender Man” stabbing. The delusional young female perpetrators (12 years old!) were committed to mental health institutions for 25 and 40 years.
It was hard not to loathe Prudence in Lois the Witch. She didn’t seem so much caught up in the hysteria as she was desirous of attention. I felt she was putting on a show, fully knowledgeable that it was all a sham, and there were never any repercussions. She literally got away with murder.
In the Salem Witch trials, the men were just as guilty as the women. It seemed to be a perfect storm of pre-teen hysteria playing into the hands of authoritarian men intent on female subjugation.
The article below notes that, “The Salem witch trials are an infamous case of mass hysteria; they are an example of the consequences of religious extremism, false allegations, and lapses in the due legal processes.” If you take those three elements, then many large scale, global incidents of genocide (including the Holocaust) could be viewed as mass hysteria, right? I know it’s more complicated than that, but still…religious extremism, false allegations, and lapses in the due legal processes…a toxic cocktail that is still served up today, 300 years after the Salem Witch Trials. The Salem Witch Trials: A case of mass hysteria | Real Archaeology
Did anyone notice that Lois’ love interest goes from Hugh Lucy to Ralph Lucy about half way through the novel? Lois’ uncle was Ralph, so my guess is that was an unintentional mistake due to serializing the story. I remember reading that Charles Dickens did the same thing in one of his serialized novels – inadvertently changed a first name halfway through, but no one seemed particularly bothered by it. Guess editing was more lax in those days.
