The story is told from the point of view of a small-town college professor who discovers that his wife is a witch.

[2] Tansy Saylor is the wife of an up-and-coming young sociology professor at a small, conservative American college.

Her husband, Norman, discovers this one day while rummaging through her dressing table: he finds vials of graveyard dirt, packets of hair and fingernail clippings from their acquaintances, and other evidence of her witchcraft.

"[3] Damon Knight wrote[4] Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber, is easily the most frightening and (necessarily) the most thoroughly convincing of all modern horror stories ... Leiber develops [the witchcraft] theme with the utmost dexterity, piling up alternate layers of the mundane and outré, until at the story's real climax, the shocker at the end of Chapter 14, I am not ashamed to say that I jumped an inch out of my seat ... Leiber has never written anything better.Anthony Boucher and McComas similarly lauded the novel as "one of the best of all novels on witchcraft survivals in the enlightened modern world.

[7] Everett F. Bleiler found Conjure Wife to be "nicely handled as a suspense story, although Saylor's psychology is a little simplistic.