54 pages • 1 hour read
Ami McKayThe Witches of New York
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaParts 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “September 4, 1880: New Moon” - Part 2: “September 17, 1880: Full Moon”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “City of Wonders”
Content Warning: This novel features references to the dehumanizing treatment of women and children as well as depictions of suicide. Additionally, the source material uses offensive terms to refer to Romani people and people with mental health conditions throughout, which is replicated in this guide only in direct quotes.
In New York City, the ghost of Samuel Morse is looking for a witch, while Jenny Greene, a sex worker, is looking for her next customer. At the Great Bridge, Lena McLeod is imploring the river not to kill her husband. In a tea shop by Madison Square Park, Adelaide Moth and Eleanor St. Clair help their customers with their magical gifts.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “By Knot One”
In Stony Point, a small town outside of New York City, Beatrice Dunn records her astral and weather observations in her quest to note inexplicable anomalies. Nervous and excited, she counts the days until she can go to New York and apply for the shop girl position at Tea and Sympathy, Eleanor and Adelaide’s tea shop. If she doesn’t get the job (or any other employment in New York), she plans to return to Stony Point and live an ordinary life with her aunt. Twelve days before her departure, she makes a Witch’s Ladder, a charm she’s read about, in hopes her wish will come true.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary: “Between Sleeps”
A witch like her mother Delphine, Eleanor has made many products for her customers that are illegal and considered immoral, such as contraceptive pills and menstruation tinctures. She tried to study as a nurse when she was younger but ultimately took on her mother’s craft when she became ill. It was through her time as a nurse, however, that Eleanor was able to secure a job as Adelaide’s maid in 1879. Becoming fast friends, they opened the tea shop together.
As Eleanor sleeps, her ring-bearing raven, Perdu, watches over her. He tries to wake her so that she will share her dreams with him as she did in the past, but she’s forgotten her dreams lately. Unbeknownst to both Eleanor and Perdu, two Dearlies, Bright and Twitch, have crafted a dream to warn Eleanor and Perdu of a new witch who is coming, one who is made instead of born. Bright implores Eleanor to help the girl she shows her in her dream, but Eleanor barely remembers it when she wakes. Since Perdu shared her dream, she charges him not to forget the girl.
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “The Girl Who Knows”
As she dresses, Adelaide recalls her difficult childhood when she was forced to use her foresight for others. She was trafficked three times by the time she was 13 and needed to recreate her identity from the child “Moth” to her adult self, Adelaide Thom. When Eleanor breaks a teapot, Adelaide recalls a night when a woman threw vitriol, a caustic liquid, at her face. Her skin was left scarred, and she lost an eye. As she recovered, her friend, Sadie, arranged for a private nurse—Eleanor—to attend to her.
Just as she is about to leave the room, she smells cherry brandy and wonders aloud if it is her mother’s ghost. When nothing happens, she is resigned to try and find yet another medium who can put them into contact that night.
Meanwhile, articles in the Daily Messenger discuss the arrival of Cleopatra’s Needle, an obelisk said to have mystical power, in New York.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Beatrice Dunn Takes Flight”
On the day of her departure, Beatrice finds that passenger trains aren’t running because of the Needle’s delivery. Discouraged, she considers taking a ferry, but she hears a freight train approach. When she walks over, she spies Joseph Wheeler, a friend from school, loading his potatoes on the train. She convinces him to take her along with him.
Along the journey, they discuss her plans to go to Madison Square Park for a job. This doesn’t surprise Joseph, as he believes she is not like the other girls in Stony Point. When the train unexpectedly slows, Beatrice and Joseph leave their cart and find that the Needle is blocking their way. They mingle in the crowd, and Beatrice loses sight of Joseph. As she tries to peek at the obelisk, a mysterious man helps her to a spot where she can touch it and trace the glyphs inscribed there. When she turns around, the man is gone. Just as Joseph calls for her, Beatrice trips and loses consciousness.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Shop Talk (and Secrets)”
Exhausted by her fitful sleep, Eleanor entertains three customers at her shop, one of whom is Lucy Newland, her former lover who is now married. Adelaide, meanwhile, is reading her customers’ fortunes with her deck of cards. In a lull between customers, she tries to tell Eleanor about the ad she placed for a shop girl but is interrupted by the arrival of her good friend, Judith Dashley. As they catch up, Judith tells Adelaide of an alienist (an outdated term for a psychiatrist) by the name of Quinn Brody who wishes to meet her and witness her foretelling talents. Thinking her friend might be infatuated with the man despite her happy marriage, she agrees to meet him the next day.
Girls arrive for their interviews, but Eleanor turns them away and berates Adelaide for placing the ad without consulting her. They argue, and both leave the shop.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Knocks and Rappings”
After waking from her loss of consciousness, Beatrice arrives at the tea shop to find that no one is there. She is late for her interview, and her fall has left her feeling sick. Suddenly, Perdu opens the door, which surprises her. A woman is seated at the table and asks her if she wants her future read. When Beatrice sits, the woman’s appearance quickly morphs and becomes ghoulish. Frightened, Beatrice faints.
When Eleanor returns to the tea shop after trying to speak with Lucy, she finds Beatrice on the ground. She tends to her as she regains her senses. Beatrice then explains what she has seen since her encounter with the Needle. When she shows her the witch’s ladder she made, Eleanor senses the magic in it.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “A Moth Seeks the Light”
Too furious to return to the tea shop, Adelaide searches for a medium. She goes to Mr. Beadle, whom she heard had an encounter with a witch. When she meets the man at his home, he recounts his encounter with the recently widowed Lena McLeod, whom he had hired as a live-in maid after his wife had died. He tells Adelaide of the strange occurrences that started when she moved in: hearing odd noises from her room; discovering a circle she’d drawn on the ground; and finding a bundle of rags, bones, and a pair of men’s pantaloons in the basement. He explains that a reverend, Reverend Townsend, came to take her away three days ago, and he hasn’t heard from them since. Adelaide leaves, hoping no other witch will encounter Mr. Beadle.
Reverend Townsend’s anti-witchcraft leaflet is reproduced. He warns against women who prioritize “intelligence over righteousness, books of black magic over the Bible, superstition over faith, fashion over modesty, politics over prayer” (84), saying they are witches in league with the devil. He quotes a Bible verse that admonishes women to be silent and submissive to men.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Mr. Beadle’s Witch”
Lena has been locked in a cellar for three days and has been given no food, water, or rest. On the fourth day, Reverend Townsend interrogates her and blames her husband’s death on her alleged witchcraft. Lena, however, is not a witch and only meant to scare Mr. Beadle with fake representations of witchcraft. Townsend does not believe her. Claiming to enact God’s will, he physically abuses her, especially when she recites the Lord’s Prayer in Scottish Gaelic instead of English. He believes she is speaking the Devil’s words.
The next morning, while reciting the prayer once again, she dies by suicide in the cell. Townsend finds her and feels immensely satisfied by her death, only to stutter out an explanation for her demise when two men come to collect her body. They tell him all will be well as long as he fasts and prays.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “A Message from Abroad”
Beatrice sends a letter to her aunt saying she obtained the shopgirl position. Meanwhile, Eleanor looks after the shop as she determines whether Beatrice is trustworthy.
She remembers the time she spent with her mother, Delphine, growing up in the cottage on her uncle’s farm. Delphine told her the tale of a princess named Odoline, who wished to become a witch. Odoline rejected every suitor, which led the King to reach out to a sage for advice. A handsome prince, Sev, appeared with the most powerful book of spells for Odoline, warning her that she should never open it. In return, she chose him as her suitor and gave him a ring with the inscription “All my trust” (95). The prince, however, was the sage in disguise, and he charmed the book to seduce the princess into opening it. On their wedding day, Odoline opened the book, and the demon Malphas emerged, threatening to kill her. When demons are summoned by witches, however, they must obey them. Odoline demanded that he bring her a companion and leave. A raven appeared, and as Malphas disappeared, he cursed her and every witch after her to have to hide their gifts from the light. From that day forward, the witch hunts began.
When Delphine told Eleanor this story, she gave her a key and instructed her to teach the new witches who were made and not born. Eleanor recalls how two men tried to take Delphine’s body when she died, but they made her and Perdu uneasy. Ultimately, she refused them.
Eleanor seeks the counsel of tea leaves and is shaken to find her mother’s key in her teacup. Adelaide returns to the shop. The Dearlies, meanwhile, watch over and marvel at Beatrice but do not yet offer her a dream.
Parts 1-2 Analysis
Though The Witches of New York is a fantasy novel, the author crafts the narrative’s structure to blend in historical fiction aspects. This accentuates the plausible historicity of her story. McKay primarily achieves this effect by including different types of archival paraphernalia, such as newspaper clippings, calling cards, and excerpts of Delphine St. Clair’s grimoire. The inclusion of Townsend’s leaflet on the persistent dangers of witchcraft is a particularly useful addition, as it showcases how information—ads and opinion pieces, specifically—was circulated through printed media during the Gilded Age. It also foreshadows the dangers that Eleanor, Adelaide, and Beatrice will eventually face. When Townsend describes the many forms of witches as “the healer, the fortune teller, the academic, the suffragist, the spiritualist” (84-85), the leaflet highlights the era’s misogynistic discourse against women’s education and civil rights. Townsend, as a figure who represents traditional patriarchal points of view, endorses and perpetuates these viewpoints, and the pamphlet foreshadows how he targets Eleanor, Adelaide, and Beatrice for falling within these categories. Using the leaflet thus creates verisimilitude in the story while still retaining a fantastical quality, as it attends to historical discourse and media methods while blending the dividing line between fact and fiction. Likewise, the act of cataloging paraphernalia, both textually and in the story with Beatrice’s collection of clippings and notes, fashions the story as an archive for Beatrice’s eventual writing project, A Census of Astonishments. It is also the evidence she needs “to measure the rate of the inexplicable, the temperature of strange” (10). Not only does The Witches of New York become a repository for all instances of “inexplicable” occurrences, but it proves itself a testament to the lived “inexplicable” experiences that Beatrice faces with Eleanor and Adelaide at her side.
This section of the narrative also showcases the combined effects of two themes, The Dangers of Being a Woman and The Ignorance and Harm in Zealous Convictions, in the main setting of the novel: Eleanor and Adelaide’s tea shop. Tea and Sympathy is described as “neither remarkable nor inviting, [but] to a select society of ladies who spoke the right words and asked the right questions, it was a place of whispered confessions and secret cures—a refuge run by women they could trust” (18). The description points to two underlying tensions within the novel. First, the tea shop’s remote appearance, air of mystique, and exclusivity to women in the know highlight a need for a safe space for women to discuss their issues with other women who will take them seriously. It gestures to the fact that outside of the tea shop, the world is far less kind and receptive to women’s worries and needs. The author purposefully sets up the tea shop in opposition to Blackwell’s Island, where women are incarcerated, denigrated, and abused for the very same concerns and needs they would express at the tea shop, i.e., needing contraceptives or counseling for their futures. Secondly, the tea shop’s description also points to the pressures Eleanor and Adelaide face for offering their services as witches. As Eleanor’s family motto encapsulates—“Always needed, ever hunted” (19)—society’s combined hostility toward witchcraft, nontraditional gender roles, and women’s bodies force Eleanor and Adelaide to operate secretly with select clients who will not betray them to overzealous men like Reverend Townsend. Though there is always a demand for Eleanor’s magic and Adelaide’s advice, hiding their business is the only way they can both provide a safe space for other women and safeguard themselves against society’s ire.
McKay also demonstrates the opposition that Eleanor, Adelaide, and Beatrice face by juxtaposing different perspectives on witches. In the eyes of a witch like Eleanor’s mother, Delphine, “witches see to things best sorted by magic—sorrows of the heart, troubles of the mind, regrets of the flesh” (19). For her, witches are individuals who help their communities through extensive herbal and magical knowledge. Others, like Mr. Beadle, have largely misunderstood witches and ascribe a mythic definition that is both inaccurate and meant to demonize them. As he tells Adelaide, “[T]hey always have one black eye [n]o matter what colour their eyes was before […] That’s when I knew it wouldn’t be long before she’d be trying to take one of my good eyes from me” (81). His description of a witch’s eyes gestures to a fictitious account of witches, one specifically made to make Lena—who does not consider herself a witch and does not have a black eye—a predatory figure. Like others, Mr. Beadle manipulates the rumors and false accounts about witches to serve his own purpose: to make himself look like the victim and Lena like the villain, when he was he who preyed on her before delivering her to Reverend Townsend. This shows how misogyny creates structures that allow men to harm women and blame their victims for their fates.
