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The Biography of Manuel #4
The Witch-Woman: A Trilogy About Her
The Witch Woman collects three fantastic novellas set in Poictesme, the imaginary medieval land featured in such Cabell classics as Jurgen and Figures of Earth, all dealing with the most central of Cabell themes, the elusive feminine ideal, here personified in the seductive Ettarre la Beale, the third daughter of Dom Manuel the Redeemer. Here we read how a poet, a king, and a bishop (who also happens to be a werewolf) sought the unattainable Ettarre, and what became of them
- GenresFantasy
164 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1948
96 people want to read
About the author
James Branch Cabell
240 books125 followersJames Branch Cabell was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles lettres. Cabell was well regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare."
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 16, 2024
Good stories but i hate this edition. Its not bad looking on the outside but it has like 20cm margins. When it arrive i was so mad i hacked into it with a hobby knife.
No regrets, its print-on-demand i don't have to respect such 'books'. Didn't make a great job of it but didn't lose any writing and now it has a proper margin on bottom and side.
I could have taken something off the top too but didn't bother. It actually looks unmolested while on the shelf.
Edit: Its quite sturdily put together i'll give it that, lot of glue. Had to resort to a saw to get through the spine :P .
No regrets, its print-on-demand i don't have to respect such 'books'. Didn't make a great job of it but didn't lose any writing and now it has a proper margin on bottom and side.
I could have taken something off the top too but didn't bother. It actually looks unmolested while on the shelf.
Edit: Its quite sturdily put together i'll give it that, lot of glue. Had to resort to a saw to get through the spine :P .
August 25, 2024
The Witch-Woman, first published in 1948, collects together James Branch Cabell's three stories about Ettarre, The Music from Behind the Moon, The Way of Ecben, and The White Robe. The only additional material in The Witch-Woman is Cabell's introduction. It's convenient to have all three stories together in one volume, although The Witch-Woman is not published as beautifully as the other three first editions and contains none of their excellent illustrations.
Cabell confirms that the story of Ettarre is first told partially in The Silver Stallion, as she is Dom Manuel's third daughter. Aside from her role in the three witch-woman stories, Ettarre also appears with Horvendile in The Cream of the Jest and is touched upon in the twenty-ninth chapter of Jurgen.
Cabell also clarifies that the three witch-woman stories each illustrates one of his three themes that run throughout the Biography of the Life of Manuel: The Music from Behind the Moon represents the poetic attitude to life, The Way of Ecben the chivalric attitude, and The White Robe the gallant attitude.
The three separate stories of The Witch-Woman are relatively minor components of the Biography of the Life of Manuel. Together, however, they constitute a book which approaches the significance of Cabell's greatest novels, either Figures of Earth, or The Silver Stallion, or Jurgen. I prefer to read the stories in their original, illustrated editions, but collected together in this way they are a fine example of Cabell’s best work.
Cabell confirms that the story of Ettarre is first told partially in The Silver Stallion, as she is Dom Manuel's third daughter. Aside from her role in the three witch-woman stories, Ettarre also appears with Horvendile in The Cream of the Jest and is touched upon in the twenty-ninth chapter of Jurgen.
Cabell also clarifies that the three witch-woman stories each illustrates one of his three themes that run throughout the Biography of the Life of Manuel: The Music from Behind the Moon represents the poetic attitude to life, The Way of Ecben the chivalric attitude, and The White Robe the gallant attitude.
The three separate stories of The Witch-Woman are relatively minor components of the Biography of the Life of Manuel. Together, however, they constitute a book which approaches the significance of Cabell's greatest novels, either Figures of Earth, or The Silver Stallion, or Jurgen. I prefer to read the stories in their original, illustrated editions, but collected together in this way they are a fine example of Cabell’s best work.
June 27, 2016
This is one of the darkest of the Dom Manuel series, but one of the best.
The first tale literally should be lifted for a Dr. Who episode, featuring a clever and purposeful mismanagement of time that leads to two alternate timelines that Cabell plays with throughout the rest of the series.
The second tale I found unmemorable and did not add much to the mystique of one of the most ethereal characters in literature, Ettare.
But the third blew my mind. Called "The White Robe," this tale feels like a 1960s Roger Corman flick featuring Vincent Price. This is probably the best werewolf tale I've ever experienced and twists you as the reader into different interpretations of the main character until you give up at the end, another victim of Ettare.
This book is the "Dom Manuel" fantasy series at its least comical, but approaching its peak of creativity.
The first tale literally should be lifted for a Dr. Who episode, featuring a clever and purposeful mismanagement of time that leads to two alternate timelines that Cabell plays with throughout the rest of the series.
The second tale I found unmemorable and did not add much to the mystique of one of the most ethereal characters in literature, Ettare.
But the third blew my mind. Called "The White Robe," this tale feels like a 1960s Roger Corman flick featuring Vincent Price. This is probably the best werewolf tale I've ever experienced and twists you as the reader into different interpretations of the main character until you give up at the end, another victim of Ettare.
This book is the "Dom Manuel" fantasy series at its least comical, but approaching its peak of creativity.
June 21, 2023
The only other piece of writing that ever made me felt this seen was Poe's "Alone"
January 13, 2025
This is a collection of three stories, each concerning Ettarre, a daughter of Manuel the Redeemer (though really, who can keep track):
* The Music from Behind The Moon: A man seeks and wins his muse and, well, they pretty much get along great.
* The White Robe: A werewolf becomes a church leader despite, or because of, his utter lack of faith. An odd and rather unsatisfying tale, though not without its poignancy.
* The Way of Ecben : A triumphant king turns his back on success and the world to serve an ephemeral Lady who leads him deeper and deeper into humiliation and subjugation, and he loves every minute of it.
These three stories are strangely positive in comparison with the preceding novels in the series. The marriages all seem to work out, any suffering leads to happiness, and nobody really gets the short end of the stick. Perhaps that is why they seem so forgettable?
A list of all of ten of the stories in the original, fictional volume The Witch-Woman which have been lost in time due to never having been written to begin with: The Music from Behind the Moon, The Thirty-first of February, The Furry Thing That Sang, The Lean Hands of Volmar, The Holy Man Who Washed, The Little Miracle of St Lesbia, The White Robe, The Evasions of Ron, The Child Out of Fire, and The Way of Ecben.
The usual quota of Cabell quotage:
"The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules."
"Her also he put out of living, by-and-by". Nicely, er, put.
"And then that woman did a queer thing, for she laid to her young breasts her hands, and from the flesh of her body she took out her red heart, and upon her heartstrings she made a music." This kinda reminds me of a Dawn of Madness scenario.
On talking about sex in the late-Victorian era: "Certain words one avoided: but all these had many synonyms, apart from the fact that the things they stood for could be, and were, made livelily communicative in pantomime."
On the alternative or avant-garde music scene: "No other person willed to hear a music which doubtfulness and discontent made unexhilarating. They thronged, instead, to hear the sugared and the grandiose music which Madoc peddled, and which, like a drug, buoyed up its hearers with self-approval."
"Therefore he went to Maya of the Fair Breasts, who controlled Wednesday." I mean, who wouldn't? I cannot imagine the line there must be before her door.
On running a successful Crusade: "He was granted also the biliousness and the upset digestion needful to create an all-overbearing ardor against any compromise with the soft and wheedling ways of evil."
"She answered him with that cool, and yet condoning, bright gaze which women keep for the strange notions of men."
The reminisces of St Mary the Egyptian: "Such was the form of loathsome and unnatural caress for which I was particularly notorious, before I found repentance and true faith." How 'bout one last one for old times' sake?
On being put to the question: "The Abbot would prolong painstakingly the more concrete arguments of the Church so as to win for every backslider and every heretic sufficient time in which to repent and thus be spared from suffering in the next world." Not so different in spirit from many bona fide arguments I have heard in defense of one theism or another.
"An altruist would dissuade therefore the evilly inclined from all incivic vices like murder and rape and theft and arson which, even when practised upon an international scale and under the direct patronage of the Church, tended always to upset the comfort of society."
On young love: "In no great while, these silly children would be self-respecting men and women, and this bleating and this pawing at one another would happily be put aside for warfare and housework and other sensible matters."
"I approach thus unavoidably a theme which nobody can approach with any real profit. I mean, the younger generation. From the beginning, it would seem, all really matured opinion has been at one on the point that the younger generation was speeding posthaste to the dogs. Since the commencement of recorded literature, full proof has not been lacking that oldsters everywhere in every era have drawn a snarling comfort from this pronouncement just as pertinaciously, and just as pathetically, as the world's current youth has always been positive that, once everybody over fifty was disposed of, the human race was bound for the millennium around the next corner but one. In practice, though, the younger generation appears invariably to get to middle age before it does to either the dogs or the millenium. ... The younger generation has always passed through its so brief career in a never failing excitement - an excitement roused by the discovery that the existence of God is open to dispute, but that the pleasures of coition are not."
* The Music from Behind The Moon: A man seeks and wins his muse and, well, they pretty much get along great.
* The White Robe: A werewolf becomes a church leader despite, or because of, his utter lack of faith. An odd and rather unsatisfying tale, though not without its poignancy.
* The Way of Ecben : A triumphant king turns his back on success and the world to serve an ephemeral Lady who leads him deeper and deeper into humiliation and subjugation, and he loves every minute of it.
These three stories are strangely positive in comparison with the preceding novels in the series. The marriages all seem to work out, any suffering leads to happiness, and nobody really gets the short end of the stick. Perhaps that is why they seem so forgettable?
A list of all of ten of the stories in the original, fictional volume The Witch-Woman which have been lost in time due to never having been written to begin with: The Music from Behind the Moon, The Thirty-first of February, The Furry Thing That Sang, The Lean Hands of Volmar, The Holy Man Who Washed, The Little Miracle of St Lesbia, The White Robe, The Evasions of Ron, The Child Out of Fire, and The Way of Ecben.
The usual quota of Cabell quotage:
"The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules."
"Her also he put out of living, by-and-by". Nicely, er, put.
"And then that woman did a queer thing, for she laid to her young breasts her hands, and from the flesh of her body she took out her red heart, and upon her heartstrings she made a music." This kinda reminds me of a Dawn of Madness scenario.
On talking about sex in the late-Victorian era: "Certain words one avoided: but all these had many synonyms, apart from the fact that the things they stood for could be, and were, made livelily communicative in pantomime."
On the alternative or avant-garde music scene: "No other person willed to hear a music which doubtfulness and discontent made unexhilarating. They thronged, instead, to hear the sugared and the grandiose music which Madoc peddled, and which, like a drug, buoyed up its hearers with self-approval."
"Therefore he went to Maya of the Fair Breasts, who controlled Wednesday." I mean, who wouldn't? I cannot imagine the line there must be before her door.
On running a successful Crusade: "He was granted also the biliousness and the upset digestion needful to create an all-overbearing ardor against any compromise with the soft and wheedling ways of evil."
"She answered him with that cool, and yet condoning, bright gaze which women keep for the strange notions of men."
The reminisces of St Mary the Egyptian: "Such was the form of loathsome and unnatural caress for which I was particularly notorious, before I found repentance and true faith." How 'bout one last one for old times' sake?
On being put to the question: "The Abbot would prolong painstakingly the more concrete arguments of the Church so as to win for every backslider and every heretic sufficient time in which to repent and thus be spared from suffering in the next world." Not so different in spirit from many bona fide arguments I have heard in defense of one theism or another.
"An altruist would dissuade therefore the evilly inclined from all incivic vices like murder and rape and theft and arson which, even when practised upon an international scale and under the direct patronage of the Church, tended always to upset the comfort of society."
On young love: "In no great while, these silly children would be self-respecting men and women, and this bleating and this pawing at one another would happily be put aside for warfare and housework and other sensible matters."
"I approach thus unavoidably a theme which nobody can approach with any real profit. I mean, the younger generation. From the beginning, it would seem, all really matured opinion has been at one on the point that the younger generation was speeding posthaste to the dogs. Since the commencement of recorded literature, full proof has not been lacking that oldsters everywhere in every era have drawn a snarling comfort from this pronouncement just as pertinaciously, and just as pathetically, as the world's current youth has always been positive that, once everybody over fifty was disposed of, the human race was bound for the millennium around the next corner but one. In practice, though, the younger generation appears invariably to get to middle age before it does to either the dogs or the millenium. ... The younger generation has always passed through its so brief career in a never failing excitement - an excitement roused by the discovery that the existence of God is open to dispute, but that the pleasures of coition are not."
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews