THE CRIMSON BOOKSHELF

IN Frances Winwar's newest novel, "Gallows Hill", lovers of American history and died-in-the-wool New Englanders will find a new angle of approach to the bloody tradition of the Salem witchcraft persecutions. Aside from the fact that the subject is a familiar one to most of us, the novel is a gripping story displaying in all its emotional actuality the horrors of those ignorant days. The author's faithful adherence to facts which could have been accumulated only by extensive research into the Archives of Salem and Boston brings to the reading public much that is actually biographical about the lives of such men as Cotton and Increase Mather, Samuel Parris, Goody Bishop, Stoughton, Phips, and other figures of Massachusetts' early history.

Finding her inspiration in the facts behind the witchcraft of Salem, Miss Winwar proceeds to enlighten and embellish their horror as well as their beauty with the result that the spirit of the times is once more captured and the reader can more easily understand the forces at work to create such a reign of terror. The hatred and intolerance of the straight-laced but hypocritical Puritans with their cast iron moral codes and their frigid attitude is set in striking contrast with the loyalty, the courage, and the affection of their brothers. The narrowness and prejudice of the Puritan mind is shown in a psychological light which reflects also on the more human members of the Salem colony.

The plot of the story surrounds the cruel legalized murder of Briget Bishop and the accusations and attempts made on her daughter Mary. Born in a country where a woman might call her soul her own, and not be accused of witchcraft because she had certain marks on her body which every woman was not afflicted with, Briget fights her way through the terrors of a trial and an execution to preserve the reputation of her daughter and save her from a mad people who knew not what they did.

Historical figures and events are described with the greatest possible fidelity to the facts. Cotton Mather, the austere and prejudiced young minister from Boston, appears at first as a wholly detestable figure in the book, but upon consideration we realize that his closed mind was no different from the of almost every citizen of Salem. Samuel Parris, whose interest in the conviction of several of the witches was more than a religious one, Nathaniel Saltonsall, the only man in Salem who had the strength to stand up and refuse to assist at the trials, and many others remain in our memory as living people, not dry, lifeless figures found only in books of history.