The Ladies of Grace Adieu

Masquerading as an ethnographic anthology edited by an earnest scholar of faerie, these tales, enchanting as they are unnerving, place spell-casting witches and shape-shifting avatars of the supernatural in the historical England of Clarke's best-selling novel, ``Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell." Strange and Norrell even make a cameo appearance in the title story, in which three Regency-era ladies summon sorcery to defeat a more corporeal threat. In ``Mrs Mabb," a determined young woman who could pass for a Jane Austen heroine bravely wrests her bewitched fiancé from the grasp of a fairy queen. Other narratives embellish similarly fanciful plots with eccentric literary flourishes. What saves the project from preciosity is Clarke's mastery of pastiche, her wry wit -- and the complicity of readers still hoping to meet those fairies in the garden.

Water From the Well: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah
By Anne Roiphe
Morrow, 274 pp., $24.95

As Anne Roiphe reminds us in this affecting meditation, there are no saints in the Old Testament. Biblical time may be a time of miracles, but it is also a time of human beings, of fathers and sons, laborers and kings, warriors and prophets, all of them flawed, all of them fallible. And hovering in the background, sowing the patriarchs' fields, bearing their burdens and their children, are women whose roles, when mentioned at all, seem merely supernumerary.

In fiction and in nonfiction Roiphe has celebrated the common themes in modern women's lives, creating a sisterhood of the imagination. Here she extends that sisterhood backward to embrace the matriarchs of the Hebrew Bible, endowing them with the detailed if idealized emotional lives the biblical scribes denied them. In her sympathetic storytelling they become yearning physical beings who feel the same pain, ambivalence, and mother love that she deems universal among women in all eras, enduring with dignity in societies that have needed them far more than they have honored them.

Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World
By Eve Ensler
Villard, 202 pp., $21.95