Eighty Years Ago, The Idea Of The Good Witch Entered Popular Culture

The Wizard of Oz‘s Glinda the Good Witch of the North was the first sorceress figure not to wear black, cackle, have a cartoonishly ugly face, or do evil — and so became the grandmother of Samantha Stevens (Bewitched), Sabrina, and Hermione Granger. Writer Pam Grossman makes the case that Glinda was much more than a “silly pain in the neck” (as Salman Rushdie had it) — and locates Glinda’s likely origin in L. Frank Baum’s mother-in-law. – The Atlantic