Weaving women's wisdom

Monthly newsletter, June 2025

Read on for a special 20% discount on the forthcoming Wise Women paperback, and the audio recording of an exclusive new wise-woman story from the north of England.

---

Dear enchanters and enchanteds,

This month I’m afraid I’m something of a content-free zone, as I’m grinding away here into the last flagging, gibbering days of completing this new manuscript and my brain cells are all shot to hell and back. It’ll be done with by the end of the month, and hopefully soon after that I can tell you more about it – and also restart my brain and be back here in July with rather more to say!

There is one lovely piece of news, though, and a couple of offerings below to go with it. The paperback edition of Wise Women: Myths and Stories for Midlife and Beyond is out on October 2 and is available for pre-order, and I’m delighted to be able to share with you its bright and beautiful cover. Madder red, to be precise: a special request I had and I’m grateful to the lovely people at Virago for humouring me.

For those of you who are new to my work, I conceived of Wise Women so that, for the first time, a large body of elder-woman folklore from the European tradition that I’d unearthed over a period of several years might be brought together in one place. And so that I could rewrite them in a more literary form, honouring their origins in the oral tradition, but evening out some of the archaisms and bringing some of their quieter aspects to life. Drawing on my many decades as a psychologist as well as a folklorist and mythologist, for each of the 32 stories collected in the book, there’s also a commentary which offers ideas about how it might inform and inspire older women today.

---

An extra­ordinary selection of stories ... beautifully and vividly retold, elaborating the bare-bones structures of folk tales into delightful literary short stories that will be enjoyed by a wider readership than the wise older women for whom the book is intended. ― Times Literary Supplement

Features an exuberant cast ... The collection is precious, because it's the first time that these rare, patriarchy-surviving remnants of powerful elder female folk stories have been deliberately anthologised ... Genius. ― Irish Times

Special pre-order discount: 20% off

I’m delighted to be able to offer readers of this Substack a special pre-order discount from the publishers: you can pre-order from Virago here at their online store and, by using the code WISE, you can get 20% off the RRP of £10.99 all the way through October 1 at 11.59pm UK time.

Just a note that this edition is from the original UK publishers and is for the worldwide market outside of North America; I don’t believe there are any plans for a new edition by the publishers there. However, you can still order this new paperback for delivery anywhere in the world, including free international shipping, from Blackwells in the UK, at this link.

---

An exclusive new Wise Women story

As most of you will know, when Wise Women was published in hardback last year, paying subscribers had access to a booklet of five all-new exclusive stories about wise women, with commentaries, which complement those I chose for the book. (You can find the booklet here, entitled Old Wives’ Tales.) Because I can’t seem to stop my now-six-year-long research project to collect more older-woman folklore, and because I love all the stories I’m still discovering so much, I’ll be expanding that booklet with a handful of new ones to celebrate the launch of the paperback at the beginning of October.

However, in the absence of having much to say in this month’s newsletter while I’m hard at work finishing that new manuscript, I wanted to offer you all one of those new stories here. It comes just in an audio version and without a commentary (the full texts and commentaries will be reserved for the revised booklet in October) but I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway. You can find the recording below.

And until next month, I’m wishing you all the blessings of whichever season you find yourself in. Here in the Beauteous Vale, we are finally blessed with plenty of much-needed rain. And, of course, the inevitable consequent and decidedly rampant weeds …

Sharon

‘Food and Fire and Company’: a story from the Peak District in Derbyshire

From: Ruth L. Tongue, Forgotten Folk-tales of the English Counties. (Routledge Library Editions: Folklore) 2015.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been especially delighted to find a number of older-woman stories from the north of England, where I’m from. This is one such story, and it’s from the Derbyshire Peak District. For those of you not from the north of England, or not from England, a couple of clues: first, the visiting creature in this story is a house brownie, sometimes called a hobgoblin, boggart or bogle – though boggarts and bogles can be malicious. Second: the old woman names him ‘Summat Else’. In the dialect of the north, ‘summat’ means ‘something’. If you didn’t feed or otherwise honour the house brownie, he would leave; this was known as ‘turning the luck out of the house’. It’s also lovely, in this story, to hear reference to the old custom of ‘well-dressing’: covering a village well in flowers.

Enjoy!