(no subject)

[regshoe]

Originally posted here on Tumblr.

JSMN characters who I think need more appreciation, and am therefore appreciating in this post:

• Maria Absalom, a brilliant magician who owned the coolest house in England and is also apparently the only character other than John Uskglass to enjoy a magically extended lifespan.
  
• Margaret Ford and Donata Torel, who were (we think!) the leaders of a rebel society of female magicians, and had their legacy remembered through a sexist nonsense fairy tale.
• The fairy lady from Lost-hope who has beetles instead of hair.
  
• Catherine of Winchester, one of the greatest Aureate magicians, who learnt from the Raven King and (unusually for an Aureate) wrote things down; she’s responsible for the haunting, beautiful paragraph that opens The Ladies of Grace Adieu.
• The Newcastle glovemaker’s daughter, who doesn’t have a canonical name and about whose life we know very little, but who meets the Raven King years after his disappearance, and visits his strange lost house. (I think if I could be any character in the novel, it’d be her).
• Miss Redruth, who attends the meeting of the York Society of Magicians at the end of the novel — she’s apparently the only woman there — and her two sisters, who stay at home because they’re busy studying magic.
• The two thirteen-year-old girls (also unnamed) who are some of the first people to do practical magic after it returns to England: their brothers try to eavesdrop on them, and they use magic to make the brothers’ ears detach and fly away.

Tags: anyone who thinks this book doesn't have strong female characters isn't paying attention, yes they're often in the margins but that's kind of the point, the people in the margins are important, the very king of magic deliberately removes himself from the centre of the country and the story, and haunts the margins instead, and pays attention to people like them