Bright I Burn by Molly Aitken

A book review

Bright I Burn is based on the life of Alice Kyteler, a thirteenth-century Irish woman who inherited her father’s profession as innkeeper and surpassed his ability with money. In medieval Ireland, it would have been unthinkable for a single woman to run an inn, so she was quick to marry again each time she was widowed, eventually rousing the suspicion of a bishop with the power to accuse her.

Aitken’s writing style is exceptional, reminiscent of masters of historical fiction like Anya Seton and Cecelia Holland, while incorporating her own flourishes. She never attempts to mimic archaic English—her characters, after all, would not have been speaking English—but her graceful prose never feels jarringly twenty-first century. Nor does she pretty up her characters to suit modern sensibilities. Alice is a product of her time and upbringing, intelligent and practical, but with a wild streak foreshadowed in the opening passages when as a child she encounters a wildcat with its kill:

“My father told me all of Ireland’s wildcats were slaughtered by the Romans before those men left our shores, a thousand years ago or more, but once my mother whispered to me, said that when she was still a girl she met a lynx and with her bare lips kissed it.”

The foreshadowing of Alice’s role as a subject of the earliest witch persecution in Ireland is lighter. Unlike most novels about medieval women accused of witchcraft, Bright I Burn focuses on its subject’s full and interesting life as daughter, wife, mother, friend and shrewd businesswoman. Although Alice’s choices are not always admirable, in a life replete with difficulties she immerses herself fully in the ebb and flow of it, rarely complaining, taking responsibility for her own needs, and always appreciating the everyday wonders that people, then and now, too often overlook. (2024, 253 pages including a short afterword listing a few recommended sources)