BERNICE BARRY The Names of a Hare. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Set during England’s witch persecutions, Bernice Barry’s novel draws on the magical associations of the hare and tips its hat to Lorna Doone.

There are things you’ll be wanting to know and I will tell you most of them, but there’s one thing I will not give and that is my name … There’s something in a name that holds power.

Mary-Ann Lightfoot, May, Maple Durham – all these are the names she has been known by at different times. There are good practical reasons for this, but also ‘to say a name is powerful magic’, and magic and superstition are powerful and dangerous forces, especially when the self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’, Matthew Hopkins, is going from town to town with his retinue of torturers and his band of women ‘prickers’, who test for blood from any marks on a woman’s body. He claims he is ‘doing God’s work’, seeking out those who consort with the Devil.

In Cornwall, in the early 1600s, the Reverend Martyn has, unusually, taught his daughter mathematics, grammar and Latin, but to be a woman with knowledge is also dangerous. Her mother died in childbirth, and his housekeeper, Gunnet Dawes, provides her with gentle care, but also teaches her things that will change her life. She shows her how to recognise, name and collect plants, and how to use those that grow on the dunes and in the village gardens to heal simple ailments, telling her

‘The green things growing freely around us are nature’s gift, so they come from God … So isn’t it a sin not to use them to help those in need, if we know how? … But we must never forget that what we do is dangerous. You must remember that. Be wary. Comero weeth!’

Gunnet is also a source of country wisdom:

‘Keep your roots shallow like the furze bushes, child. Grow thorns as they do, and you’ll survive anywhere in life.’

It is the furze bushes that save her when she is 15 and a local boy grabs her as she comes back alone from the beach. But it is the scratches from the thorns he falls into when she fights him off that his mother says ‘don’t look human’, and she is accused of cursing him ‘with diabolical oaths’ and marking him with her nails ‘like a woman bewitched’.

She knows that she has always been different to others, and that sets her apart. She is ‘obsessed with precision’ and delights in ‘numbers, patterns, perfect order’, but is socially awkward and flinches from touch and from eye contact. As a child, she learns to distance herself from all around her. Holding her treasured white stone – her ‘flying stone’ – she can lie in the dunes with her eyes closed and lift up and see herself from above. She does not know if this is ‘a gift from God or a sin’, so she keeps it secret.

It is the boy’s sisters, who mercilessly torment her whenever they see her, who cause her first flight into hiding, and it is her betrayal by a woman she had considered to be her only friend that results in her being publicly accused of witchcraft. She is locked in her room, then in the church, because she is a witch and ‘must be tried for murder’.

With her father’s help, and with a bundle and a message sent to her by Gunnet, she escapes. Gunnet’s message tells her ‘how to find the way eastward’ and that she must walk at night, in valleys and away from roads, and never to climb a hill or come home. She must also swear never to give her name.

After four days, hungry and exhausted, she climbs a hill to get away from people celebrating round a bonfire. There, she collapses, but is rescued by an odd couple who take her to their half-hidden cottage on the moor. However, it seems that they know who she is, the door is locked, and the woman tries to steal her bundle, so, using a herb Gunnet has given her, she drugs the couple, and steals the key. She never knows if the herb was lethal or not, and later she believes that the woman has laid a curse on her.

All her life she has been aware of animals as omens and she has a special relationship with hares. In spite of the superstitions about them, Gunnet had told her that if you respect and honour them, they will bring you luck. But you must never call them by their true name.

If they move across the way I’m walking, I always take off my cap, put aside whatever I’m carrying and say the words Gunnet taught me. I call them by their many names and wonder if they know all of mine. I, too, have been the steal-away, the hidden one, the friendless, the one that everyone scorns.

So, when again she collapses exhausted on the moor, it is not surprising that a hare becomes part of her own story. She loves to hear the woman, Annis, tell of how she was found:

‘First there was a hare … lying on its side on the bare ground at the top of the hill and unmoving, out in the open where a sick animal should not be.’

Annis runs home for a blanket so that she can take it home to nurse it. When she returns the hare has gone but nearby is a bundle of rags.

‘A tumble of scraps, grey and brown, more mud and frost than a living thing. And then you opened your eyes and looked right at me.’

She stays with Annis, who lives in a remote, steep-sided Devon valley and survives by making ‘country remedies’ that local people pay for, either in goods or with a few coins. Annis calls her ‘May’, and May soon learns that Annis, unlike Gunnet, knows ‘high magic’ – charms, curses and rituals – but she issues stern warnings that ‘dark magic is not a plaything’ and that curses can rebound on the user.

When Hopkins turns up at Annis’s cottage seeking help for a genital infection, Annis is careful but blunt, and angry at his hypocrisy. She tells him that he has ‘the French disease’, ‘the pox’; and that it is God’s divine punishment for his sins. Angers flare, Hopkins attacks May, but she escapes and flees again.

 She renames herself Maple Durham and moves from place to place, providing simple remedies in exchange for food, but always aware that Hopkins is looking for her.

A chance meeting on the moors with Ensor Doone leads to a secret love affair, but when the Doone family (reputed to be Scottish nobles dispossessed from their lands by a blood relative) buy a barely accessible valley nearby, they are ‘the talk of the whole area … spreading fear all along the coast’.    

Matthew Hopkins finds her again and she has terrifying confrontations with him and, later, with his loyal deputy, Philip Spicer. In desperation, she resorts to dark magic, but aborts the ritual and never knows whether the events that follow were caused by her or not.

The final pages are magical and return beautifully to her link with the hare.

Bernice Barry skilfully weaves folklore, herbal knowledge, magic, history, and the Doones of Richard Blackmoor’s seventeenth-century novel Lorna Doone into The Names of a Hare. Her old Cornish woman tells her story in a straightforward, old-fashioned style, and along the way she shares occasional gems of herbal knowledge, like the recipe for a soothing drink for a child’s sore throat, and the power of the periwinkle flower ‘worn close to a woman’s most secret places’ to ensure a happy fertile marriage.  A glossary of Cornish words would sometimes have been helpful, and the gap in time and change of narrator between the opening chapter and the one that follows it is initially confusing, but this is soon forgotten. An inserted chapter describing the violent childhood of Matthew Hopkins does not excuse his evil adulthood and is superfluous, but the rest of the book is absorbing and enjoyable. Bernice Barry, like her many-named heroine, knows that words are potent things and that ‘a story shared is the highest magic of all’.

Bernice Barry The Names of a Hare Freemantle Press 2026 PB 236pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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