Reclaiming women's stories: book announcement

Wise Women: European myths and stories of midlife and beyond

Please read on for a full description, book video, pre-order information, and exclusive bonuses for paid subscribers and members of The Hearth.

Dear friends

I hope you’ll forgive me intruding into your inboxes for a second time this week, but today is very exciting for me: it’s cover reveal day, and the day when finally I get to tell you all the juicy details about my next book, Wise Women: Myths and Stories for Midlife and Beyond. It’s coming this October, from Virago in the UK and worldwide (October 3) – except for the North American version, which will be published by New World Library (October 8).

And it’s perfect timing, because yesterday I joined a small panel to talk about women and ageing on the iconic BBC Radio 4 program, Woman’s Hour. It’s such an important topic, and good to see the subject getting more attention. My contribution to it all is to offer up new inspiring stories to live by, for women in the second half of their lives. Which leads me directly to Wise Women.

But before I go on, here's the cover – and yes (for the Virago version) that is a beautiful gold foil on the jacket, which means that as well as ensuring you have a lovely object when you buy the book for yourself, it will also make a perfectly gorgeous gift for Hallowe’en, or later, for Christmas!

Why Wise Women?

For over five years now, I’ve been embroiled in a long and delightful research project to dig out and analyse stories about older women in European folklore. During these years of obsessive excavation, ever-growing piles of musty, beautifully illustrated old fairy-tale collections and regional folklore monographs have tottered precariously on my desk while I searched through them for lost and hidden gems. In between times, I scoured many online archives and folklore journals dating back to the 1800s. Much to my delight, I unearthed a surprising number of stories populated by older women who hold the protagonist’s fate in the palm of their gnarly old hands, who see the bigger picture (and probably were the ones who painted it in the first place), or who have the last laugh.

My last book, Hagitude, was focused on the distinctive archetypal characteristics of a few of these women, but I didn’t have room in it to tell their stories in full, or to write about the entire, lavish array of enchanting elder women I’d discovered, right here in my own European tradition. So in the summer of 2022 I conceived of Wise Women in order to gather together, for the first time, this large body of stories that I’d collected. My motivation was, once again, to bring back to life these funny and feisty ageing women who have been so thoroughly forgotten. My hope is that this rich and diverse collection of characters will offer insight into the ways that each of us could uniquely embody a bold and purposeful elderhood. My hope from the beginning has also been that these stories will be told as well as read – and more on that, and how to tell such stories, in the coming months.

Drawing on my many decades as a psychologist and mythologist, for each of the 32 stories collected in the book, I’ve offered a commentary at the end which offers up ideas about how it might inform and inspire older women today.

Here's the publisher’s description:

An unforgettable collection of retold myths and folk tales celebrating the wisdom and power of women in midlife and beyond

Ungainly giantesses. Sequin-strewn fairy godmothers. Misunderstood witches. Fierce grandmothers. Hairy-chinned hags. Craggy crones.

From early childhood, we learn about the world and its possibilities through myths and fairy tales. The heroines, though, tend to be golden-haired princesses, and the evil-doers often older women.

But from midlife onwards, women today are searching for positive versions of themselves, and this dazzling array of not-to-be-messed-with characters provides them. They outwit monsters, test and mentor younger heroines, embody the cycles and seasons of the earth, weave the world into being – and almost always have the last laugh.

These women manifest their wisdom in different ways, and so offer us inspiration for how we too can walk boldly and live authentically in the second half of life.

To read an extract from my Introduction to Wise Women, please visit this page on my website. And do keep an eye out in this newsletter for info about live events I’ll be doing for Wise Women, later this year.

Wise Women book video

Here’s a short video I’ve just recorded, talking about how the book came to be, and what is inside.

Exclusive extra stories for paid subscribers

I’ve been collecting folklore about older women for well over five years, and I didn’t stop after the contents of Wise Women were finalised last year. So on Saturday October 12, just after publication, paid subscribers will receive a special PDF file. Inside it, you’ll find four additional stories, which complement the stories I collected for Wise Women (but which do not appear in it or anywhere else) along with my commentary on those stories.

Exclusive online Wise Woman retreat for members of The Hearth

For my regular Samhain retreat with founding members, on Saturday November 2, I’ll lead a 90-minute workshop on the Wise Woman archetype, and what it might mean for women today.

Pre-order plea!

I hope you’ll forgive me putting out a plea for pre-orders, because they matter so much to a book’s fate: they tell both retailers and readers that they should pay attention to a book. Pre-order numbers are a good early indicator of a book’s likely success, and this can lead to retailers increasing their initial orders for it, so ensuring that the book will be available on publication in physical stores. Online pre-orders are important for the same reasons too; pre-orders on Amazon, for example, make it very much more likely that a book will show up in search results and recommendations.

So very many books are published each year, and so if you love my books, paying a visit to your local bookshop to ask them to order Wise Women for you in advance of its publication is one of the most supportive things you can do. It will draw their attention to the book and show them that there’s plenty of interest, which in turn will make it more likely that they’ll order in more copies, ready for publication day. And booksellers’ support for a book can hugely impact its success.

If you’re more likely to order online, then it’s worth knowing that with online retailers, including Amazon, you don't usually pay for any pre-orders you make at the time of placing the order. You’ll usually only pay when the book is shipped, so if you're planning to buy the book at some point anyway, then pre-ordering it won't mean you’re charged up front, and of course it’s always possible to cancel. And it will ensure that you don’t forget, and miss the buzz and the conversations around its publication!

(It takes a lot of people, not just an author, to make a good finished book. So I just want to recognise here my brilliant literary agent, Jane Graham-Maw, who not only took this book to a five-way auction back at the end of 2022, but whose support during the process of writing and completing this project went beyond the call of duty. Closer to publication, I’ll tell you a bit more about how it all works.)

Sharing the love

I’d be very grateful if you would forward this email to any friends, family and colleagues who you think would like Wise Women.

As always, I’m immensely grateful for your support for my work and your enthusiasm for my books.

Sharon

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