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The story apparently takes place some time in the past, apparently in England, in a fictitious area in which there is a desert bounded by the ‘Eastern Ocean’. It concerns the families of two cousins, Eliza Hayes and Beatrice Milford, the two heirs of their cousin Mr Hayes. He prefers the daughter of his father’s brother, Eliza, to the daughter of his mother’s sister, Beatrice, so wills Eliza three-quarters of his estate, leaving only one-quarter to Beatrice, much to Beatrice’s chagrin. Eliza marries Blenheim; they have two children who apparently die, one from drowning. The bereaved parents leave, supposedly for two to three years, but do not then return; they seem simply to disappear. At about the time that Eliza marries Blenheim, Beatrice marries Selwyn; they take the Blenheims' property after the Blenheims' disappearance. Beatrice and her husband have an evil son, William, and two virtuous daughters, Sophia and Emily; the daughters are each willed £10,000 which they are to receive when they turn eighteen, but the parents want the fortune for their son, so they put the unwitting daughters in a convent when Sophia is eleven and Emily is ten. Also living with the Selwyns are twins, Horatio and Ferdinand Congreve, offspring of Selwyn's deceased half-sister. In the convent, Sophia and Emily become friends with the twelve-year-old Lavinia and her sister, the ten-year-old Selina. These girls are introduced as the daughters of a nobleman whose marriage is secret; they go by their mother's name, Rosemont.

Five years later, the girls all go visit the Selwyns. Horatio falls in love with Lavinia and Ferdinand falls in love with Sophia. Mr Selwyn wants to seduce Lavinia and William wants to seduce Selina, both thinking that women have no virtue, a conclusion they have reached from Mrs Selwyn's example. For amusement, the young people all go to women known as the Woodland Witches to have their fortunes told. There, they are greeted by talking animals and the witches' tiny helpers, none over two feet tall, who yet seem to be human. On a wall there, the group sees a picture that changes as they watch.

One night, the Selwyn girls are sent to speak to their mother and the Congreves are made drunk so that Mr Selwyn can rape Lavinia and William can get Selina to elope with him. Horatio and Ferdinand arrive in time to save the girls, however. Horatio rides off with Lavinia, Selina is returned to the convent, and the Selwyn girls are sent to another, under the watchful but really sympathetic eye of Fanny, Mrs Selwyn's favorite maid. The girls all disappear and the next we see them, they are at the witches' house; also there are Lavinia and the twins.

We learn here from a former servant of Selwyn's that the Blenheims - Eliza and her husband - are captives of a Turkish corsair. She is held in the harem but has not been molested: she is apparently mostly there for show; possessing a European woman gives status to her possessor, but the Corsair finds Mediterranean women more sexually desirable. Mr Blenheim works as a gardener, as the Corsair’s slave. Selwyn knows of the imprisonment but does nothing to liberate them, wanting to keep their property. Lavinia turns out to be the Blenheims' eldest daughter, who had not drowned but was spirited away by the Selwyns; her real name is Aurora. Selina is actually the daughter of a woman who was abandoned by her husband, gave birth to Selina, and died. Selina was raised by the parents of Selwyn's informative servant; it was this servant, disguised as a nobleman and following Selwyn's instructions, who originally put Lavinia and Selina into the convent.

The witches and all of the protagonists (Horatio, Ferdinand, Sophia, Emily, Aurora, and Selina) get Judge Wilmot involved in the affair for legal backing. He lives with his daughter, who was drugged and raped by a man she had admired, gave birth to a daughter, and sees herself as ruined. Her father does not see her as sinful, however, and neither does a baronet who later woos her and respects her the more for her telling him her story.

The witches have access through underground passages to one convent and Fanny is sister to one of them (Fanny and her sister are both daughters of the convent's proctoress), so could help the Selwyn girls escape; during Selina's flight from the convent in which she was being held, they orchestrate seemingly supernatural events at the dreaded Ninth Tower at the convent, though a smile that appears on the face of a statue of the Virgin Mary there is harder to explain away. One of the witches learned to train animals to speak from her late husband, who also made clockwork figures, which is what their tiny helpers are; her sister, another of the Woodland Witches, likewise widowed, is a ventriloquist, and enables these automatons to speak. The other witch - Fanny's sister - is their niece. They are, in fact, not witches as all, as far as we can tell, given that (most of) their 'magic' is explained away.

The twins and Selwyn's servant (who no longer works for Selwyn) rescue the Blenheims; Aurora is reunited with them and Horatio marries her. Ferdinand marries Sophia. Selina and Emily divide their time in visits to each group. The good prefer domestic pleasure and benevolence, and we are given the moral: while filial affection is good and obedience is appropriate nine times out of ten, we should disobey parents when they would have us go "against duty to ourselves, to a friend, to society, and even TO OUR MAKER!" (261).

Two appendices follow. One defends the author's use of speaking animals, ventriloquism, and explainable 'magic' and claims that her evil characters are no worse than Shakespeare's (275-285); this defense, she explains, is a response to the Reverend William Jones's criticism of a draft of the novel. The other appendix, on ventriloquism, provides passages and examples from Chambers's cyclopaedia, by Rees as authority for her use of it (286-96).

© 1999 Julie A Shaffer / Sheffield Hallam University