Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

[james_davis_nicoll]

Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

Comments

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

One of the Leiber books I'd heard about, but never got around to picking up and reading. Now I'm wondering just how intrusively the sexism fairy is likely to have visited the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books, which I enjoyed as a teen, but haven't reread in (mumble) years.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories are so overwhelmingly sexist that I noticed it when I was reading them at age 11 (but I liked them anyway).

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

The first F&tGM features a terrible example of what would later become known as "fridging".

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

recommended as essential reading by SF Gateway

"Essential" can be meant in the sense of "exemplary," not necessarily good or admirable. Birth of a Nation is an essential part of American film history precisely because of its horrifying racial attitudes. It's an important part of the Jim Crow era.

Whether that's the kind of thing SF Gateway had in mind, I don't know. I do see it doesn't make the top four on the "essential reading" list.

[(Anonymous)]

"3: True, he has to have one of the other profs check his math. He doesn’t at all seem like the kind of fellow who would set the world on fire. Indeed, none of the Hempnell faculty appear to be more than merely adequate."

As I recall, Saylor has to have another prof actually do the math - all Saylor can do is set up the symbols and relationships.

You might be interested in this story http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/mccarthy.htm by Kim Newman which is about Samantha Stevens encountering a real McCarthy Witch-hunt, but Tansy and Professor Saylor also turn up as minor characters.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I think I still have a copy of this somewhere. When I read it I remember thinking it was an interesting commentary on academic culture and the expectations of faculty spouses (who would have been entirely wives at that time), neither of which has changed as much as one would hope in the intervening decades.

But yes also v v sexist.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

When my mother was a young faculty wife in the late 60's, she was also a young Ph.D., and had to fend off a certain amount of criticism that she was damaging her husband's career by not doing the usual supportive things. Also she always, always had to talk her way into the Faculty House for receptions and such, every time, because wives weren't allowed. I think my father generally had to come out and explain to the doorperson that it was okay.

In fact, of course, my father's career turned out fine. At least as fine as Saylor's.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I recall that I started to read this once, but only got about halfway through. I think I subconsciously expected something like Bewitched, and was disappointed that it seemed to take itself more seriously than that.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Is "mathematics and magic" a fairly modern trope? I see (by Wikipedia) that L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea stories started seeing print in 1940.

[kjn]

Hardly. "Sacred geometry" is an old concept. Pythagoras included plenty of mysticism in their approach to mathematics (or it was the other way around). Astrology requires quite a bit of math (especially since astronomy includes a lot of astronomical knowledge). And so on.

In a way, one could say that "mathematics of magic" couldn't become a trope until after the rise of the scientific method, which split alchemy into chemistry and (magical) alchemy; astrology into astronomy and (magical) astrology, and so on. Before that, it was all simply part of natural philosophy.

[lampwick1.livejournal.com]

It was very strange reading this as an adolescent girl. It obviously plays into deep male suspicions, but of course every woman who reads it will reject the basic premise right away -- No, of course we're not witches. It was obvious to me from the beginning that this wasn't written for me -- or for half the human race, for that matter. (And I really liked Leiber then, and still sort of do.)

Are you going to try Our Lady of Darkness? The racism fairy has been at that one with a vengeance.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Many men are deeply oblivious in ways most women are not...and some are bright enough to notice that they're being outsmarted in ways they're not well equipped to understand.

[(Anonymous)]

Your opinions on the faculty are shared by Aldous Huxley. Leiber began writing the book while he was a tutor at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1942. Only a few years previously Huxley had dealings with Occidental and satirised some of the faculty in “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan”.

The “behind every great man is a great woman” theme Leiber specifically adapted from JM Barrie’s play “What Every Woman Knows” which I think FL cites in passing in the book. Leiber in retrospect: “I would say that on the whole writing Conjure Wife humanised women for me, did more to make me a feminist than to bastion a belief that women are sinister and dangerous man-dominating bitches, though of course there is considerable of both in the book”.

The rationalising of magic aspect I suspect was played up for John W. Campbell. Indeed the original inspiration was JWC’s suggestion that modern women carry so many items in their handbags it might well include materials for witchcraft.

The surprising absence of post Pearl Harbour concerns is because Leiber was partly using the novel as a distraction from his internal conflicts about the possibility of being drafted and his pacifist ideals.

- matthew davis

[vass]

My favourite part is when he mansplains how magic works to his wife, and has to keep stopping for her to tell him the parts he doesn't know so that he can explain them back to her.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

This book should, of course, have been written by Shirley Jackson.

See also http://sovay.livejournal.com/723449.html

[(Anonymous)]

It would be very interesting to see this book written by Shirley Jackson and starring Emmy Noether.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

The war bit reminds me of Dean's _Tam Lin_, set on a college campus during the Vietnam War, not that you could tell. I think Roe vs. Wade happens in the background, too.