Do Elphaba & Glinda Kiss in the ‘Wicked’ Book? Their Relationship, Explained
For as long as there has been Wicked (the book, the musical, and now the movie), there have been Gelphie shippers.
No matter how you swing it, Wicked is a love story between The Wizard of Oz‘s Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba, and Good Witch of the North, Glinda. The only question is whether that love is platonic or romantic. Turns out, the answer varies depending on who you ask because everyone from the author of the original book to the movie’s leads, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, has a different interpretation.
Below, we’re breaking down everything you need to know about Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship in the book ahead of Wicked: For Good, including whether they end up together or not.
Do Elphaba and Glinda kiss in the book?
Gelphie shippers, rejoice! In Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba and Glinda share a kiss — before they never see each other again. In other words, during the book, instead of singing “For Good,” the witches let each other know just how much they’ve been changed with a kiss. While the iconic (and emotional) song definitely replaced their smooch in the musical, the two scenes hold the same purpose as far as we’re concerned.
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Maguire writes, “‘You’ll be all right,’ Elphaba said, ‘now you’re a seasoned traveler. This is just the return leg of a voyage you already know.’ She put her face against Glinda’s and kissed her. ‘Hold out, if you can,’ she murmured, and kissed her again. ‘Hold out, my sweet.'” When Elphaba and Glinda part, he writes, “Elphaba hadn’t cried, of course. Her head had turned quickly as she stepped down, not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence. But the sting, to Glinda, was real.”
In terms of what this scene means for the characters, things get a little bit more complicated. Read on to find out if Elphaba and Glinda were “kissing the homies goodnight” or actually making a move.
Are Elphaba and Glinda in love?
Short answer: Absolutely.
Long answer: That depends on how one defines love. Both Elphaba and Glinda had affection for each other, and most readers agree that, while Glinda had romantic feelings for Elphaba, Elphaba did not reciprocate those feelings for most of their story, until they were saying goodbye.
In a 2024 interview with Them, Maguire explained that the “sapphic tension” between his two leading ladies was no mistake. He explained, “That was intentional, and it was modest and restrained and refined in such a way that one could imagine that one of those two young women had felt more than the other and had not wanted to say it.” Maguire even went as far as to say, “Or perhaps because a novelist can’t write every scene, perhaps when the lights were out and the novelist was out having a smoke in the back alley, the girls had sex in the bed on the way to the Emerald City. I wanted to propose this possibility, but I did not want to make a declarative statement.”
What have Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande said about Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship?
Surprisingly, the Wicked: For Good leads have shared quite a bit of their own literary analysis when it comes to their characters’ sexualities.
In an interview with Gay Times, Erivo explained that while she can see the vision, she wants viewers to come to their own decision. She stated, “They do have a real relationship. It is true love, which is probably why people are shipping it. What they build with each other is an unbreakable bond and love.”
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On the other hand, Grande was a little more eager to confirm a romance. She told Gay Times that Glinda “might be a little in the closet.” According to the former Victorious star, true love “transcends sexuality.”
Do Elphaba and Glinda end up together in the book?
Unlike the musical, which shows Elphaba and Fiyero leaving Oz together after she fakes her death (or melting?), Elphaba dies at the end of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. That said, Glinda’s story continues throughout the rest of the series, which consists of four novels: Wicked (1995), Son of a Witch (2005), A Lion Among Men (2008), and Out of Oz (2011).
During the final novel, Out of Oz, Glinda ends up imprisoned due to suspected treason. However, in the final chapter, Glinda is freed from her cell by a mysterious figure who speaks exactly like Elphaba. While Elphaba has been presumed dead for years, many in Oz have suspected that the Wicked Witch had faked her own death, just as the musical suggests.
“In her cell, Glinda woke up with a start,” Maguire writes. “Her glasses had broken a year ago. She didn’t need them anymore, not really. She knew who was turning the door handle of her cell. She called her name sleepily, and added, ‘You wicked thing. You’ve taken your own sweet time, of course.'”
There are two generally accepted interpretations of this scene. However, both imply that Glinda and Elphaba end their lives together, in some way. The first theory is that Glinda is at the end of her life and hallucinates her late love as she takes her final breaths. The other is that Elphaba has been in hiding the whole time and decided to return to save Glinda after she heard about her imprisonment. Either way, Maguire makes Glinda’s last moments about her love for Elphaba, whom she truly never stopped thinking and talking about throughout the series, which is definitely intentional. If you ask us, that moment is all we need to prove that Gelphie is canon.
Be sure to check out our full analysis of the Wicked book versus the musical here!
Wicked: For Good, Only In Theaters, November 21, 2025
Wicked, Streaming Now, Peacock
