In the nineteen-eighties, feminists lambasted Dahl for his supposed misogyny, focussing on “The Witches” (1983). In 1985, one critic called the book “a dangerous publication,” which bore a “striking similarity” to the “misogynistic” fifteenth-century witch-hunting text “Malleus Maleficarum.” It was a bizarre comparison. Dahl does write in “The Witches” that a “witch is always a woman”—but not that a woman is always a witch. The strongest, most appealing character in the book is the boy narrator’s cigar-smoking, tough-minded, and immensely loving grandmother.
