The Enchantress of Florence (2008) is Salman Rushdie’s tenth novel and his eighth fictional work to be partly or wholly set – explicitly – in the Indian subcontinent. In this sense, it fits into what Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn describes as the “post-Midnight” (post-Midnight’s Children) portion of the Rushdie corpus, in which can be included Shame (1983); The Satanic Verses (1988); East, West (1994); The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995); The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999); and Shalimar the Clown (2005). This grouping defines Rushdie’s creative engagement with national and cultural identity in the Indian subcontinent and, reflecting his sense of an “Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration” (“Imaginary Homelands”, p.16), an exuberant magical realist aesthetic favouring interwoven narratives linked by common motifs, doppelgangers, paradoxes and inversions.
Rushdie has described The Enchantress as his most extensively researched novel, a...
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Citation: Moore, Lindsey. "The Enchantress of Florence". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 August 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23534, accessed 09 June 2026.]
