About this item
During the bleak winter of 1692 in the rigid Puritan community of Salem Village, Massachusetts, a group of young girls began experiencing violent fits, allegedly tormented by Satan and the witches who worshipped him. From the girls' initial denouncing of an Indian slave, the accusations soon multiplied. In less than two years, nineteen men and women were hanged, one was pressed to death, and over a hundred others were imprisoned and impoverished.This evenhanded and now-classic history illuminates the horrifying episode with visceral clarity, from the opportunistic Putnam clan, who fanned the crisis to satisfy personal vendettas and greed, to four-year-old "witch" Dorcas Good, who was chained to a dank prison wall in darkness till she went mad.
About the Author
Frances Hill was born in London in 1943 and went to Keele University, Staffordshire, where she obtained a BA Honours degree in English Literature and Philosophy. After travelling in Europe and the U.S. she worked as assistant to the blind journalist T.E.Utley, a leader writer and later deputy editor on The Daily Telegraph, in London's Fleet Street. She then worked for the London Times Educational Supplement, writing about education and social work issues and in 1973 moved to New York to work for the TES as American correspondent. On returning to the UK, she became a free lance journalist while working on her first novel, Out of Bounds. For many years she was the radio critic for the TES as well as a fiction reviewer and obituary writer for The Times and feature writer for many other publications including The Times Higher Education Supplement, The Guardian and The Spectator. Out of Bounds was published by John Murray in 1985 and followed by a second novel, A Fatal Delusion (John Murray) , in 1989. In 1992 she began work on her acclaimed account of the Salem witch trials, A Delusion of Satan, which was published by Doubleday in New York in 1995 and Hamish Hamilton in London in 1996. The paperback was published in England by Penguin in 1996 and in the US by da Capo in 1997. A new edition with a new preface appeared in 2002. Her second book on the Salem witch trials, The Salem Witch Trials Reader, was published by da Capo in 2000 and her third book on the same subject, Hunting for Witches, A Visitor's Guide to the Salem Witch Trials, was published by Commonwealth Editions in 2002. Such Men Are Dangerous, The Fanatics of 1692 and 2004 was published by Upper Access in March 2004. Her novel about the Salem Witch Trials, Deliverance from Evil, was published by Overlook Press in the US and Duckworth in London in 2011. Frances Hill lives in London but visits the U.S. regularly, spending every summer in Connecticut.
