Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber
"Conjure Wife" is a novel that explores themes of witchcraft, gender dynamics, and superstition within an academic setting. The story centers on Norman Saylor, a sociology professor, who discovers that his wife, Tansy, is involved in a hidden world of witchcraft practiced by the wives of his colleagues. Tansy reveals that these women engage in a form of magical rivalry aimed at enhancing their husbands' professional success. When Norman, who prides himself on his rational thinking, pressures Tansy to abandon her beliefs and protective charms, he experiences a dramatic downturn in his fortune, leading to personal and professional crises.
As the plot unfolds, Norman grapples with the implications of his dismissal of witchcraft, encountering a series of increasingly bizarre and threatening situations. Tansy attempts to protect Norman by taking on his misfortunes through magic, which leads Norman on a quest to rescue her after discovering a more sinister plot involving soul-stealing. The narrative culminates in a confrontation with the manipulative ambitions of Flora Carr, a colleague’s wife, and ultimately raises questions regarding the intersections of belief, power, and identity. "Conjure Wife" thus serves as a thought-provoking examination of belief systems and their tangible effects on life and relationships.
On this Page
Conjure Wife
First published: 1953 (novella version, Unknown Worlds, 1943; collected in Witches Three, edited by Fletcher Pratt, 1952)
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Fantasy—occult
Time of work: The 1940’s
Locale: The northeastern United States
The Plot
While rummaging through his wife’s belongings one day, Norman Saylor, a professor of sociology at Hempnell College, discovers a cache of occult paraphernalia suggesting that Tansy practices witchcraft. When confronted, Tansy astounds Norman by admitting that all women are witches and that she and the wives of other Hempnell faculty are engaged in a covert war of spell and counterspell against one another to further their husbands’ careers. Although Norman prides himself as being one of the more liberal thinkers on campus, he is mortified that Tansy subscribes to superstitious beliefs that he has spent his entire career as an ethnologist studying and debunking. Fearing for her sanity, he persuades her to destroy all of her protective charms.
Almost immediately, Norman’s luck takes a turn for the worse. He is threatened with bodily harm by an expelled student and accused of having made sexual advances by another student. A conservative trustee begins questioning Norman’s moral integrity at the same time that a colleague finds damning parallels between Norman’s book Parallelisms in Superstition and Neurosis and an unpublished doctoral thesis written one year before it. Norman’s head begins filling with suicidal thoughts and the unshakable belief that he is being stalked by an animated decorative stone dragon from a building near his office. His increasingly erratic behavior contributes to his losing the department chairmanship to a colleague.
In the hope of saving Norman from his misfortunes, Tansy uses magic to deflect his bad luck onto her, then flees. Forced to accept that witchcraft does exist, Norman uses a charm left by Tansy to locate her. He finds that Evelyn Sawtelle, the wife of the new department chairman, has stolen her soul. In order to restore Tansy’s soul to her body, Norman uses logic to distill an algorithm from the superstitions of several cultures regarding soul-stealing, and he employs the algorithm like a magic spell to temporarily steal Evelyn’s soul and blackmail her into returning Tansy’s. Only belatedly does he discover that he has been tricked, and that the soul returned to Tansy’s body is not hers but that of elderly Flora Carr, Hempnell’s Dean of Women, who has secretly yearned for Norman and hopes to rejuvenate herself by taking over Tansy’s body. Flora’s plans to have Norman kill the body in which Tansy’s soul is trapped are thwarted, and Tansy is returned intact to her chastened husband.