The story of Ireland’s first witch and the taboo of a woman’s rage

Before she began to write her second novel, Bright I Burn, Molly Aitken would sometimes light a candle and invite her central character in. Then one day, something strange occurred.

“I heard a voice in my ear, as if someone was leaning over, saying” – here, she breaks into a whisper – “are you afraid of me?”

Yes, said Aitken, out loud.

“Then I got the sense of her walking around and standing in front of me. She was almost like a child. And she [said], ‘I’m afraid of me too’.”

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Okay, thought Aitken. I think I understand you now.

“And that was my key. That’s not how I usually write. That’s not an experience I would usually have. But I felt like, because she was a person who lived, I wanted to make sure that she would want this story written by me.”

Set in medieval Kilkenny, Bright I Burn is a fictional reimagining of the life of Alice Kyteler, the first recorded person in Ireland to be condemned as a witch. Beginning in Alice’s childhood, the novel depicts the life of a fierce and ambitious woman – a banker, a mother, a wife many times over – whose notorious reputation becomes a dangerous force.

Aitken says it was an Irish Times article that first sparked the idea for the book. She had been thinking about the history of witch burnings in Perth, Scotland, where she lived until she was eight (Aitken’s father is Scottish, her mother Irish). At the same time, she was interested in “Irish women and the stories we hadn’t really heard”. She googled Irish witches, and came across an article by Jennifer O’Connell. Witchipedia. It listed “Ireland’s reputed witches”, including one Alice Kyteler.

“I couldn’t get her out of my mind. In some ways, it felt a little bit like a haunting ... In my first book, I loved the narrator, and I loved hearing her voice. This was a much more uncomfortable experience.”

[ Witchipedia: Ireland’s most famous witches ]

The book vividly recreates medieval Ireland, its challenges and customs, its increasingly influential clergy, its gossiping townspeople. There’s an ever-encroaching sense of death and violence, whether in the harsh natural world or the brutal world of men. Amid this, Alice is a driven and often ruthless woman.

“Given some of the morally suspect things that she does, I was just fascinated,” says Aitken. “Why would a woman do this? What was her motivation? How did she feel about it? It’s quite interesting writing about someone where you know all the facts about what happened, but not the why. So, you still have that thing of getting into their head and figuring that out.”

Along with Alice Kyteler, the novel brings to life several other figures from 13th- and 14th-century Ireland, including Petronilla de Meath, Alice’s young maidservant, accused of being her accomplice. References to these women recur in writings and artwork throughout the ages, for example “Lady Kyteler” features in Yeats’s poem Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, while Petronilla de Meath is one of the 39 mythical and historical women in Judy Chicago’s 1970s feminist art installation, The Dinner Party. One of the most damaging accounts of what happened was authored by Bishop Richard Ledrede, who brought forward the trial against Alice.

“His account, I feel, is extremely sexist and misogynistic,” says Aitken. “From my reading of it, he really got off on torture and had weird sexual complexes about women. [I think] he had a real problem with who [Alice] was, being such a powerful woman in a time and place where he wanted to be powerful and influential. I feel the narrative we have around her is based on his perception and his lens.”

Through Aitken’s lens, the narrative is about “a woman’s rage”.

“Women’s rage is something that’s still not really accepted,” she says. “This is changing, but not fast enough. I wanted to write a book that really celebrated and sought to understand the rage of a woman. Alice Kyteler’s rage, and her ambition, was a big part of why she was vilified. I don’t believe we’ve come as far as we’d like to think in allowing women to express all emotions or to be visibly ambitious. Medieval Ireland is not really so distant [in this sense].”

The book also leans into Alice’s mercenary nature. She is a shrewd banker who will resort to any means to protect her wealth.

I would be breastfeeding and also writing with one hand. I think that affected the writing itself. The chapters are quite short. Some people have described it as sort of feverish, and I’m like: ‘I wasn’t sleeping.’

“I just loved the idea that she was obsessed with money. I feel like we don’t read about women like that, who are just quite greedy. I feel that was quite a positive thing about her, actually. I think maybe we feel like you shouldn’t want money. But at the time, it meant freedom and being able to relax and enjoy your life instead of dying at age 16.”

I meet Aitken over coffee in a Dublin hotel. She’s on a flying visit from Sheffield, where she lives with her husband and young son. When I arrive, she’s sitting reading Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. She wears vintage clothes, including a green velvet jacket she bought as a present to herself when she published her first novel, The Island Child (Canongate, 2020). Later, she’ll head to west Cork for a friend’s wedding – Ballydehob is where she spent most of her young life.

But home is not a straightforward topic for Aitken. She was born in Scotland, moved to Ireland when she was eight, spent some time in Kildare, before moving to the rebel county around the time she started secondary school. She was educated through the Steiner system (which has a strong focus on storytelling), then studied English and Classics in Galway, before completing an MFA in creative writing in Bath Spa.

“I’ve always had a bit of a complicated relationship with my identity as an Irish person,” she says. “When I come home, I don’t fully feel I fit in, but I really don’t fit in Scotland, which is where my dad is from and where I was born. Perhaps that’s the curse of a lot of artists. We don’t feel we fit anywhere, really.”

Both of Aitken’s books to date have been set in Ireland. The Island Child, a folkloric tale set on a fictional island off the west coast, was longlisted for the Authors Club First Novel Award. It was written during Aitken’s MFA, and an early draft won her representation from the literary agency Janklow and Nesbit. The following year was spent shaping and editing the manuscript, while also working in advertising. Soon after, she landed a book deal.

All fairly plain sailing by publishing standards. But with Bright I Burn, it was another story.

“What happened was, I wrote a second novel, which I sent to my editor, and she was like: ‘Great. It’s too different from your first.’”

Aitken had written a contemporary retelling of Cupid and Psyche, but it didn’t fit with the brand she had begun to build as an author.

“We had a conversation. We were like: ‘We could do it.’ But it being so early on, and because my first book came out in such a weird time [during lockdown], we decided I should keep on a similar track.”

It must have been a big blow, to have to start again after all that work.

“I had a week where I was, like, devastated,” she says. “But I’m a person who, I understand the industry, how it works. We love books, but we’re also here to make money. I don’t know if people talk about that much, but it is what it is.”

At the time, Aitken was expecting her son, Orion.

We need to find different ways of giving voices to people in the past who weren’t able to write things down, or the writing was destroyed

“I was quite pregnant. I was like: ‘I’m not going to be able to write a whole other novel before I have this baby.’”

In the end, much of Bright I Burn was written after her son was born.

“I would be breastfeeding and also writing with one hand. I think that affected the writing itself. The chapters are quite short. Some people have described it as sort of feverish, and I’m like: ‘I wasn’t sleeping.’ ... But I think motherhood is something I’m always drawn to in my writing. Almost every short story I write, and my first novel, were all about motherhood.”

Aitken’s own mother is an artist. Her creative life, and her way of seeing the world, have impacted Aitken’s practice.

“She notices the beauty in everything, and I think I bring that to my writing. My mother is also keenly aware of colour. In my novels and short stories, I often use a single colour over and over. Bright I Burn is red. The Island Child was blue. The one I’m currently working on is yellow. It’s an odd thing to do, I know, but it helps me have a focus when writing can take you in wild directions.”

This new novel explores the story of Romulus and Remus’s mother. Aitken is working on it as part of her PhD at Sheffield Hallam University. Her focus is creative approaches to writing history.

“The way that history is written is very, I would say, old school,” she says. “What we have in the archive is mostly written from male perspectives, and often richer male perspectives. It often means that history is very one note, and it gives us a kind of skewed impression. I’m arguing that we need to find different ways of giving voices to people in the past who weren’t able to write things down, or the writing was destroyed. Creative writing is a way of revoicing the past.”

Bright I Burn by Molly Aitken is published by Canongate