Lords and Ladies

First published on 28 April 1992 by Victor Gollancz. It is the fourteenth Discworld novel and the fourth Witches book.

Pratchett strips away all the romance. His Elves are cold, alien, beautiful, and completely amoral — they treat humans as pets or entertainment and feel no empathy whatsoever. This draws on older folklore traditions in which Faerie was genuinely dangerous rather than noble.

Lords and Ladies is explicitly a subversion of Shakespeare's play — it uses the same setting (midsummer, a royal wedding, an Elvish invasion) but refuses the play's romantic resolution. Pratchett's Elves are not comic figures; they are a genuine terror.

In the novel (drawing on actual folklore), iron is fatal to Elves. It disrupts their glamour and magic. This makes Lancre's blacksmiths among its most important defenders, and the climax turns on this folk belief.

Yes. The novel represents Magrat's transition from the naive junior witch to someone who discovers real courage under pressure. Her preparation for the wedding and her role in the final confrontation mark her most significant character development across the Witches books.