Woman of the Month: Miss Eglantine Price

Eglantine Price from Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Every year I try to feature a spooky-themed lady for October’s Woman of the Month entry, and there’s a surplus of witches out there to choose from. The problem is, I’ve used most of them already: Katrina Van Tassel, Mary Sibley, Wednesday Addams (she’s kind of a witch) and Halliwell sisters from both versions of Charmed.

I was about to settle on one or both of the Owens sisters (especially with the recent release of Practical Magic 2) when I remembered – of course! – Eglantine Price.

There is no understating just how obsessed I was with Bedknobs and Broomsticks as a kid. After being showed it at school, I (somehow) found my own copy and watched it incessantly. Returning to the film after a decades-long hiatus, I surprised myself with just how much of the dialogue and details I recalled.

Eglantine Price embodies most of my life goals. She’s a single middle-aged woman living alone in a giant manse, studying the art of witchcraft. She rides around on a motorcycle that releases large clouds of yellow smoke, and has a black cat called Cosmic Creepers. She’s very much the main character of her own story, driving the action of the film from start to finish, and wants to be a witch for largely noble reasons: to assist in the war effort and defend her home from the Nazis (this whole thing being set in 1940). For this, she wants no recognition or reward, and Angela Lansbury is game for a lot of singing and dancing and comedic pratfalls.

She’s also allowed to enjoy a late-in-life romance (which is rare, and therefore important, even though I didn’t really care about it) and commands immense magical power. Watching this religiously as a child, I never realized how special she was.

Of course, because this is a Disney film, she eventually has to give up magic in order to become a wife and mother. Boo. Back in 2021 I posted an essay on The Problem with Witches which roughly hypothesized that despite the allure of witches in our fiction, there is an anxious preoccupation with the idea of women wielding hard power. It was not a particularly in-depth look at the subject, but suffice to say that once storytellers got past the concept of witches as agents of the devil, the likes of Jennifer in I Married a Witch! and Gillian in Bell, Book and Candle are inevitably required to give up their magical abilities once they fall in love.

Much later on, after the dodgy implications of this were recognized, witches were either shifted into the superhero genre (the assorted women of Charmed) or were given no greater ambition through which to funnel their gifts than running a bath shop (Sally in Practical Magic). It is power, but it is severely limited power.

Eglantine Price falls smackdab in the middle of this evolution. By the end of the story the Nazis have destroyed her magical workshop, and in hindsight, it’s obvious her oft-mentioned poor memory is a device to prevent her from recreating any of her spells. But she’s resigned to it all, claiming that she secretly knew she had no business being a witch due to her reaction to the existence of poisoned dragons’ liver.

And even though it’s a Maybe Ever After with Mr Brown (who leaves to join the Home Guard) and she’s probably going to be more of a Cool Aunt than a surrogate mother to the three orphans, the fact remains that she’s no longer a witch and is presumably settling down into drab domesticity. It’s not as depressing as the sight of Jennifer knitting in a chair or Gillian donning a flowery sundress, but it’s still pretty depressing, especially when you recall the scene in which she unwraps her broomstick. There is palpable excitement and reverence when she holds it to her cheek and utters: “my first broom!” This is clearly a woman who relishes being a witch.

So, let’s remember her in the film’s climax, in which she demonstrates her incredible power by bringing to life a makeshift army of soldiers from across Britain’s history, commanding them from a broomstick flying the Union Jack with a cutlass in her hand. Because IT IS AWESOME.