In Wonderful News from the North, Mary Moore tells the story of the bewitchment of her eleven-year-old daughter Margaret Muschamp, and of her eventual deliverance, the bewitchment of two others, her daughter Betty and son George, and the death of a fourth child, her infant daughter Sibilla. In this sense it is unique. For it is the only story of possession we have in which the authorship is attributable to a woman. It was written by Mary Moore to encourage the legal pursuit of the woman whom she believed was responsible for the misfortunes which befell her family, namely Dorothy Swinow. The story is driven by Mary's frustration at not being able to persuade anybody, including her own husband, of the guilt of Dorothy, and punctuated by Mary's ‘shopping’ for a sympathetic judge. It ends with the indictment of Swinow, but there is no suggestion within the text nor any evidence elsewhere that anything further came of it.

The authorship itself is not clear. The Preface to the Reader is signed by Mary Moore. The text speaks on occasion in the first person. But more often Mary is written of in the third person as the mother of the afflicted. The fragmentary and contradictory nature of the text is best explained if we see it more as a collection of texts, written by a number of persons including Mary, and put together by her.