One Writer to Another: Niamh Boyce Talks to Molly Aitken about the Many Directions a Story Can Take

WRITTEN BY NIAMH BOYCE

Bright I Burn (Canongate/Knopf, 2024) retells the story of Dame Alice Kyteler, the first woman accused of witchcraft in the British Isles. Though infamous within Ireland, the witchcraft trial is not as well-known outside of the country. It occurred in Kilkenny in 1324, when Bishop Ledrede accused the Dame, a wealthy Flemish merchant, of leading a sect, of making sacrifices at the crossroads and poisoning her husbands. The case was the first time someone was burned to death for witchcraft, a fate endured by Petronelle de Midia, said to be Alice’s maid. While my novel Her Kind (Penguin Ireland, 2020) centres Petronelle and her fate, Molly Aitken’s novel Bright I Burn reimagines Alice’s life, delightfully disrupting cliches about medieval women. A money lender, Kyteler was incredibly powerful, yet like many women she has entered history by the skin of her teeth – had she not been accused of witchcraft we would not even know of her existence.

Aitken remembers encountering Alice Kyteler in school, where she was spoken about “briefly, scathingly, as if she were an evil creature, a stereotypical fairy tale witch… She was clearly a complicated figure,” says Aitken, “not at all the expected narrative of a good woman wrongfully accused, and this intrigued me… If she was another victim, I wouldn’t have written this novel. I’m interested in the women of history that subvert the stereotypes we have about gender in the past.”

There are no stereotypes in Bright I Burn. Aitken is a beautifully lyrical and original writer who has brought Alice Kyteler to life as a force of nature. Animals, especially cats, have a strong presence in the book. The novel begins when young Alice encounters a lynx, and the connection drawn between the lynx and Alice forms an intoxicating thread. “The first scene I ever conceived of for the novel was the opening where Alice as a child meets a wildcat,” says Aitken. “To me this encapsulated the true Alice. This creature that ought to run free but is instead domesticated into a patriarchal society. Of course, she thrives in this society and bends it to her will, but she’s still constrained by it, and forced to adapt. The cats throughout the novel were a symbol of this domestication of a wild creature. Cats are also mentioned in the accusations made against her. As far as I could tell, this was the first time cats had been associated with witches. It would be a wasted opportunity not to use them.” In her early teens, Aitken read Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés (1992), and it was very influential. She felt constrained by her Catholic school and the Irish village she lived in which, not unlike Alice Kyteler’s Kilkenny, was rife with misogynistic gossip.

Bright I Burn is meticulously researched. Aitken used the archives and also mentioned Femina by Janina Ramirez (2022) as a wonderful source about the women of the Middle Ages, though she notes that Alice Kyteler wasn’t mentioned. Many “witch trial” books either omit the case or leave it to the footnotes. Perhaps it is the date, and its isolation as a once-off case – the Kilkenny trial happened two hundred years before the so-called witchcraft craze.  “It just goes to show how little she’s known,” says Aitken, “despite how influential she was in her day, or even how impactful her case was on later European witch trials.”

Molly Aitken’s novel has a refreshingly sensual and earthy approach to its protagonist’s sex life – Alice was famous for her four husbands. “The Fires of Lust by Katherine Harvey (2021) was an excellent examination of sex in the Middle Ages,” says Aitken. “It really showed me how incorrect the stereotypes about sexuality in this time were. It was refreshing to write a character who was so unashamed of being a sexual being. I particularly relished this because it’s not something we imagine about the women of Ireland’s past… Bright I Burn is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious woman. I want readers to feel a fire has been lit in them. I want them to feel we should celebrate women’s ambition and embrace our own rage at times. Today, we’re still policing ourselves in these arenas, but actually there was a woman seven hundred years ago who was unashamedly herself.”

One challenge of bringing this kind of story to life is conveying 13th-century Kilkenny to the reader without weighing the story down with research and socio-political information. It’s a challenge that Aitken meets brilliantly, especially through the structure of the novel – where there are short sections with titles like “At the fish seller’s stall,” “Whispers,” “How to check your baby is alive…” These succinctly and powerfully convey the world Alice moves through. It lends a light- handed feel to something very ingeniously structured.

There are many aspects to the trial of Alice Kyteler, so many powerful people involved from Pope John to the King of England.  Like many historical novels, it was a story that could have started at any point and gone in so many directions. As one writer to another, one who had also written about the case, I was very interested in Aitken’s approach to the novel, wondering did she find it difficult to choose exactly where to enter Alice’s life? Where to begin the story and where to end? Aitken was very frank and generous in her answer.

“I struggled with where to begin a lot. Initially I wrote her entire childhood, but in the end only one scene survived from that. But her childhood just didn’t contribute enough to the themes of power, sexuality, ambition and rage that I was exploring. I suppose this is the difference between fiction and non-fiction. The ending was much easier. I knew when the trial took place and what happened. There were also tantalising theories about what occurred after the trial. So I had to explore the most mesmerising possibility, as well as giving what I hope was a satisfying ending for readers, a final stand-off let’s say.”  Without giving anything away, the end is thoroughly satisfying – I imagine, Alice would be pleased.

About the contributor: Multi-award-winning Irish writer Niamh Boyce’s Her Kind (Penguin Ireland, 2020) has just been released in the US. It was nominated for the EU Prize for Literature. She lives in the Irish midlands where she’s completing her third novel.

Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 109 (August 2024)