Book
The Witch’s Head
First published 1885
Ernest Kershaw grows up amid bitter family quarrels and romantic rivalries in England, where the sinister image of a witch’s severed head becomes associated with fear, superstition and revenge. A duel and its consequences drive him to southern Africa, where he attempts to rebuild his life far from the conflicts of home.
The second half places Ernest amid colonial Natal and the Anglo-Zulu War, culminating in the disaster at Isandlwana. The novel joins Victorian domestic melodrama to frontier warfare, using the supernatural motif as a thread connecting inherited violence in England with catastrophe in Zululand.
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