Weyward, by Emilia Hart, is one of those rare debut novels which veers from simplistic narrative storytelling to pick up the challenge of multiple perspectives. More than that, Hart adds to the degree of difficulty by situating those perspectives across three completely differently time periods. Her three storytellers are women who share a genetic lineage while sharing very little in terms of the progression of industrial civilization.
The reader is tossed back through history to the year 1619 when witch hunts were quite literal for the story of Altha. Violet Ayres’ tale jumps the narrative ahead to 1942 when global warfare threatened the very survival of the human species. The current millennium is home to the travails of Kate Ayres, living in London in the last year of normalcy before Covid-19 changed everything.
Not a whole lot appears to have changed between the periods in which Altha and Kate live. Following in her mother’s footsteps as a healer, Altha must face the persecution of those who make no attempt to even understand that which does not conform to their narrow perspective. She is accused of witchcraft. Kate follows in the footstep of her ancestry while also dealing with an abusive husband intent on persecuting her for not conforming to his rigid expectations of feminine behavior. Meanwhile, the link between the past and the present is connected through 16-year-old Violet committing a sin worse than murder within the social constraints of her time: she is pregnant and unmarried and thus must be locked away from view. Her mother, too, dabbled in the witchy-like powers of controlling nature. While in hiding from her abusive lover, Kate discovers secret documents proving her genetic heritage, her right to the ancestral property, and the darker secrets ultimately allowing her mastery of this control to the point of conjuring up avian doom for her deeply misguided boyfriend.
Just that short summary hitting the high notes should be enough to illustrate that a primary concern of this novel is female empowerment. The narrative treks through a prickly path that goes beyond the obvious, however, by spreading this theme across three quite distinctly different time periods. The connections between the three women are integral to the constructing the novel’s thematic foundation. It is not just that empowerment is a constant issue for women over the ages but that the causes, consequences, and means for overcoming this patriarchal stranglehold also share commonalities.
Telling the story of any single one of these women would be enough to get the points across that no matter what the state of society at any given time, misogyny is the result of men going to any lengths necessary to maintain power through force, coercion, and the instigation of fear. Altha’s tale may be the only one in which people actually believed in witchcraft as a mean of weakening the patriarchy but as the stories of future generations of her family reveals, at heart many men are still convinced that the world is full of witches to be condemned and punished.
