List of The Worst Witch characters
Mildred Hubble is the titular character of "The Worst Witch" series. Unlike the other girls at Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches, she doesn't come from a regular witch family, but was given a scholarship which greatly impressed Miss Cackle. She is best friends with Maud Spellbody and Enid Nightshade. In "The Worst Witch", although inadvertently ruining a broomstick formation flying display when she was given a sabotaged broomstick, she saves the whole academy from Miss Cackle's jealous and rebel-ish identical twin sister Agatha Cackle, who was seeking to turn all the teachers and pupils into frogs. In the nick of time, Mildred turns Agatha and the rest of her fiendish coven into snails.
Lois the Witch
The 1861 book's five stories are "Lois the Witch" (124 pages), "The Grey Woman" (78 pages), "The Doom of the Griffiths" (52 pages), "The Half-Brothers" (20 pages), and "The Crooked Branch" (63 pages). "Lois the Witch" is a long short story or novella of historical fiction, which first appeared in 3 parts in October 1859 in the weekly "All the Year Round" edited by Charles Dickens. The story's protagonist Lois Barclay is raised in a parsonage in Barford, Warwickshire but as she becomes a young woman both her parents die. In 1691 she crosses the Atlantic to live with her uncle and his family in Salem, Massachusetts and then becomes involved in the Salem witch trials. The book's second-longest story "The Grey Woman" is a Gothic tale of a young woman who, with her lady's maid, escapes from the castle of her rich, but abusive, husband Monsieur de la Tourelle. The stories "The Doom of the Griffiths" and "The Half-Brothers" were published in the 1859 collection "Round the Sofa" after previous publication in periodicals. "The Crooked Branch" was first published as "The Ghost in the Garden Room" in the 1859 extra Christmas issue of "All the Year Round" as part of the "portmanteau" story "The Haunted House".