Victorian journalism and witchcraft history

E. Lynn Linton

1822 – 1898

Eliza Lynn Linton was the first female salaried journalist in Britain and a prolific novelist, distinguished within esoteric and folkloric studies for her Witch Stories (1861), a collection documenting historical witchcraft trials and beliefs across Europe drawn from primary sources. Her writing brought serious historical and literary attention to the subject of witchcraft persecution, documenting the intersection of popular belief, religion, and social control in pre-modern society at a time when such material was rarely treated as a subject of sustained scholarly interest. Her work contributed to the Victorian recovery of witchcraft as a legitimate field of historical inquiry.