Dame Alice Kyteler, the first recorded person in Ireland accused of witchcraft, lived a rather anti-establishment life. In Molly Aitken’s stunning novel Bright I Burn, Kyteler’s story is a poetic retelling that leaves the book’s audience, at times, feeling sorry for her, while others question Kyteler’s moral center. Nonetheless, Aitken’s portrayal of Kyteler’s numerous and tumultuous marriages places a new, critical lens over Ireland’s historic patriarchy as well as the church’s socio-political and even economic influence during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Alice Kyteler was born c. 1260 in Kilkenny, eerily enough on 31 October. Little is known about Kyteler’s life after her persecution, but research suggests that she fled Kilkenny to either England or Flanders and died sometime after 1325. Even after Kyteler’s disappearance, the Bishop of Ossory, Richard de Ledrede, continued the hunt for Kyteler, going so far as to persecute her working-class associates.
One cannot help but notice the great care Aitken takes to highlight the trials and tribulations Kyteler faced, offering the chance to tell her story. The novel’s first-person perspective strengthens this. This first-person narration deepens the sense that, in her time, Kyteler truly defied expectations and traditions in her marriages. Her first husband, William Outlaw, attempted to clamp down on Kyteler’s independence by attempting to limit her independence and dominate her business decisions. For her second husband, Adam Le Blund, Kyteler felt wild passion for and convinced him to disinherit his children and leave her a widow’s share before his death. Per Aitken’s portrayal, it is for her third husband, the sickly and frail Richard de Valle, that Alice exhibits the most affection. Her fourth and last marriage seems to be one of economic convenience. All the while, Kyteler continued to grow wealthy as a moneylender and innkeeper, and her expansive wealth caused immense jealousy among the local population. This jealousy, along with her quick remarriages after each of her husbands’ deaths, fueled local gossip as well as the accusations of witchcraft against Kyteler.
Aitken’s novel romanticizes the relationship between Kyteler and Petronilla de Meath, who—after the death of Kyteler’s fourth husband, Sir John le Poer—was charged as one of Kyteler’s accomplices. As the novel steers towards its ending, one might perceive that Alice and Petronilla were in love with one another. Their interactions are deeply intimate. In one scene, Petronilla and her daughter, Sarah, sleep in Alice’s bed at Alice’s invitation. In other scenes, Alice longingly watches Petronilla as she bravely swims in the river. Petronilla even becomes like a third partner in Alice’s marriage to Poer. When Petronilla is executed, Alice’s grief is significantly profound, even more so than when any of her four husbands died. In an act of redemption, Alice rescues Petronilla’s daughter, changes her name to Basilia, and disappears.
Of course, Bright I Burn does an excellent job of speculating the events that happened to Alice Kyteler after she disappeared from Kilkenny. In Aitken’s reimagining, Kyteler reinvents herself as a man, a monk to be exact, who eventually encounters Ledrede when he visits a secluded convent years after the events in Kilkenny. She then leaves Sarah at the convent and embarks on her own journey, which Aitken poetically portrays: “Now I breathe out, finally cold. For the first time in my life, there’s nowhere I need to hurry back to. I don’t look back. I step between the trees, open my mouth and roar.” As Aitken writes, Kyteler’s act is one of self-reclamation after many years of subjecting herself to the wills and the desires of others, predominantly men.
Bright I Burn offers a powerful take on sex. During Kyteler’s time, the church and society highly disdained open sexuality. In Aitken’s work, Kyteler is boldly, even proudly, promiscuous. She does not hide her desires for men, particularly for Le Blund. She understood the consequences of sex both emotionally and physically for a woman of her time, particularly regarding pregnancy. She understood as well that many women do not live through childbearing, which led her to be even more guarded about conception and pregnancy. Moreover, throughout her narratives, she does not shy away from acknowledging men’s impotence and, at times, she even seems to delight in it, especially with her first husband. When men cannot satisfy her, she uses a clay pipe with lubricant to masturbate, an act to which she proudly performs and one that shows her progressive attitude towards female pleasure and sex. Her tone in such scenes facilitates an elevated sense of self, power, and agency. It helps establish the idea that in her marriages, it is Alice who frankly owns her body, her wealth, her sexuality, and her marriages.
Aitken’s portrayal of Kyteler brings another Irish literary work to mind that focuses on a strong woman whose life was cut short due to societal, religious patriarchy, and sheer superstition, Milena Williamson’s Into the Night that Flies so Fast. Williamson’s debut poetry collection invites its audience to the village of Ballyvadlea (County Tipperary) and into the life and death of Bridget Cleary in 1895, whose family burned her to death after they suspected she was a changeling. Through a series of poems told from a number of different perspectives, including Bridget’s, Williamson’s verses mirror Aitken’s eloquent retelling of Kyteler’s story.
Similar to Kyteler, Cleary earned her own money, seemed to understand animals and the nature around her, and lived a life that defied socioeconomic expectations for women at the time. After Clearly fell ill mysteriously, various family members tried home remedies to treat her, but her father and husband remained convinced that a fairy had been sent to take Bridget’s place. Unlike Kyteler, Cleary never faced persecution for witchcraft, the fact that her husband stood trial for her murder and eventually left Ireland for Canada after serving a short prison stint shows that the attitudes towards women—particularly independent, strong women—as well as the laws written to favor the patriarchy had changed very little in the 500-plus years between the two incidences.
Bright I Burn also prompts another necessary tale of women wronged by men and society—Australian author Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites. Set in Iceland, Burial Rites tells the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a servant in northern Iceland who, after being accused of the murder of two men, became the last woman to be executed in Iceland. Despite their geographical and time differences, Burial Rites and Bright I Burn mirror each another as they closely examine the legal and religious systems that valued men’s testimonies over women’s. Both novels, too, thematically center around the role of truth, storytelling, identity, wealth and social class’s stark realities for both ends of the socio-economic spectrum.
Molly Aitken offers the literary world a beautifully written, fascinating novel about one of Ireland’s—and perhaps history’s—most extraordinary women. Bright I Burn questions truth’s nature and its constructs, and it dares to defy those truths historically established by and perpetuated throughout religious entities. Most of all, through careful storytelling, it also unpacks historical conversations about how a woman like Alice Kyteler can reclaim her identity and be a voice for modern women longing to liberate themselves from historic social injustices.
