Anna Goeldin—The Last Witch (1982)[1] is the novel with which Swiss writer Eveline Hasler established her literary reputation.
[4] The novel won much praise from critics who claimed it "draws von artistic intuition as much as on its expert subject knowledge.
With the rise of women's self awareness in the 1970s, Hasler was not along in making the "witch" a "feminist symbol," as Pen International wrote in 1989.
The term "judicial murder" was coined by the historian August Ludwig Schlözer in connection with the trial.
Anna Goeldin is an outsider in the community, and her gender and social position as a maidservant make her vulnerable to unfounded accusations.
The novel also includes flashbacks of Annas life from her memories of being a small child until the reason she moved to Glarus.
She was born into a “free family” where her father was a farmer, and her mother ran the household (p. 2).She was the fourth of eight children.
Anna placed this child into foster care, then immediately left the household to find work someplace else (p. 237).
After 17 months working for the family, the girl and consequently the father Doctor Johann Jakob Tschudi accused Anna of placing pins in his child's milk.
For weeks after Anna left, the child continued to spit up pins and other pieces of metal, and Mrs. Tschudi and others assumed witchcraft, leading to his formal accusation with the court of Glarus (p. 121).
The novel imagines that after her death all courts records were rewritten to omit any use of the word witch because the Glarus authorities feared being ridiculed as backwards.