The Wild Girl in Aussie Readers

Jan 29, 2013 Shelleyrae at Book'd Out rated it it was amazing

Shelves: aussie-author, provided-by-publisher, arc-are

The Wild Girl is a stunning tale of passion, love and war where history and imagination intertwine to create a wonderfully rich portrait of a woman whose contribution to the legend of the Grimm Brothers is finally acknowledged.

Dortchen Wild lives in the small kingdom of Hessen-Cassel in Germany in the early 1800's, as Napoleon Bonaparte marches across Europe. One of five daughters of an apothecary, her only relief from her father's tyranny comes from the rare occasions she can escape his attenti
The Wild Girl is a stunning tale of passion, love and war where history and imagination intertwine to create a wonderfully rich portrait of a woman whose contribution to the legend of the Grimm Brothers is finally acknowledged.

Dortchen Wild lives in the small kingdom of Hessen-Cassel in Germany in the early 1800's, as Napoleon Bonaparte marches across Europe. One of five daughters of an apothecary, her only relief from her father's tyranny comes from the rare occasions she can escape his attention and her friendship with her next door neighbour, Lotte Grimm. As the war intensifies, Lotte's older brothers Jakob and Williem return home. With a single glance, twelve year old Dortchen falls in the love with the scholarly Williem but he barely notices her and she can only worship him from afar. As war rages and Cassel is plunged into economic ruin, the Grimm brothers hope to reverse their fortunes by publishing a book of collected fairytales. It's not until Dortchen shyly offers to contribute that Williem realises Dortchen has grown up, but her father forbids any courtship between the desperately poor neighbour boy and his daughter. While the lovers endure years of enforced separation due to abuse, war and poverty Dortchen never stops hoping for her own happily ever after.

Kate Forsyth uses historical record as the anchor for a story that she then develops with informed imagination. The Napoleonic War and it's social effects grounds the tale in time and place while her fictional narrative winds in and out of what is known about the Grimm brothers, the origins of their fairytale collection and Dortchen. I don't doubt that Forsyth's research, using primary sources such Williem's diaries amongst others, is impeccable but I most admire how she creates a plausible, seamless narrative melding fact with fiction. The author's intuitive grasp of behaviour and motive ensures her characters, their environment and their lives feel authentic.

In the tradition of the original Grimm's fairytales, Dortchen's childhood is beset by darkness. Her mother was a weak woman addicted to Laudanum and subservient to her husband. Dortchen's father, pious and strict during her childhood, devolved into a drunken, abusive tyrant in her adolescence, illustrated in several harrowing scenes. The war and resulting economic deprivations is hard on the family and though three of the sisters are eventually able to escape, Dortchen is forced to remain at home and care for her ailing parents. It is saddening to see Dortchen withdraw into herself in self defense, her spirit eroded by her fading hopes for escape from her father. The spark is only revived when she steals a moment or two with Williem. Her relationship with him is fraught with angst, drama and passion, their love is challenged repeatedly and a happy ending is never guaranteed.

The fairytale's appear in the narrative not just as stories passed between the characters but also with some relationships to the plot. Dortchen often hopes that Williem will recognise her pain in the tales that she tells, though his scholarly focus seems to make him somewhat oblivious to the subtleties. They also reflect the political and social instability of times with tales of greedy kings and an abandoned, unfed children, despite their origin being from other times and places. The fairytales themselves are both versions of familiar stories like Cinderella and Snow White as well as less well known tales like that of a singing bone that identifies a murderer.

Really I could go on, The Wild Child is remarkable. A tale of triumph over adversity, an epic historical romance, a fascinating glimpse into the history of storytelling - it is all those things and more. One of my favourite reads for the year, I recommend it wholeheartedly. ...more

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Mar 06, 2013 Kathryn rated it really liked it

Shelves: reading-list-2015, 4-stars, fiction, australian-authors

This was the story of Dörtchen Wild and Wilhelm Grimm (of the Grimm Brothers Fairytales). Set in the time of Napoleon Bonaparte’s seemingly unceasing conquests of Europe, and for all anyone else knew at that time, the whole of the world, it is a story of struggle for survival by the Wilds and the Grimms - neighbours in a little Prussian county.

Dörtchen (the 5th of 6 sisters) told Wilhelm a lot of the fairytales that he (and his brother Jakob) included in their book. The times they lived in were ...more

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Apr 07, 2013 Sheree rated it it was amazing

Shelves: reviews, own, historical-fiction, aussie-author, read-in-2013

I'm kicking myself for waiting so long to read a novel by Australian author Kate Forsyth. I purchased Bitter Greens in 2012 after reading a number of glowing reviews but *shame face* it's still unread ... I won't be stupid twice ;)

The Wild Girl is an exquisite package, an epic tale of love, war and fairytales, impeccably researched, deftly layered and beautifully wrought. Kate, you hoped I'd be enchanted ... I truly was.

My copies of the Grimm Brothers fairytales from childhood are well loved an I'm kicking myself for waiting so long to read a novel by Australian author Kate Forsyth. I purchased Bitter Greens in 2012 after reading a number of glowing reviews but *shame face* it's still unread ... I won't be stupid twice ;)

The Wild Girl is an exquisite package, an epic tale of love, war and fairytales, impeccably researched, deftly layered and beautifully wrought. Kate, you hoped I'd be enchanted ... I truly was.

My copies of the Grimm Brothers fairytales from childhood are well loved and enjoyed still but I've never actually read anything about Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm nor Henriette Dorothea (Dortchen) Wild, the girl who lived next door to the Grimm family, so for me this was a uniquely special experience. Age old fairytales, some familiar, some not, are seamlessly blended with the narrative, contributing authenticity, poignancy and magic.

Haunting, breathtaking, evocative The Wild Girl has a dark beauty that left me speechless and in tears more than once, in turn entranced, outraged, horrified and saddened.

Kate Forsyth captures the complexities of the human spirit with raw sensitivity ... frailties, cruelties on one hand, courage, selflessness and goodness on the other. Dortchen's father gave me nightmares, whilst I loved the detailed apothecary descriptions I was secretly hoping Dortchen would use her vast herbal knowledge and give her father a much needed dose of something lethal ... and painful!

Dortchen Wild fell in love with Wilhelm Grimm the first time she saw him. She was only twelve years old, but love has never been something that can be constrained by age. It happened in the way of old tales, in an instant, changing everything forever. It was a fork in the path, the turn of a key, the kindling of a lantern.

Through the Napoleonic Wars, poverty, sickness, abuse, Dortchen's love for Wilhelm is steadfast, her spirit crushed over the years by the oppressive control of her father, hope and longing remain palpable.

... the end came all too soon but weeks later I sigh as I remember the beauty.

The Wild Girl is a gift of storytelling about storytelling, it deserves to enter the exalted realm of classics.

Recommend: An emphatic YES ...more

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Mar 13, 2013 Stephanie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: aww-2013, read-2013, kindle

Kate Forsyth once again delves into the world of fairy tales, The Wild Girl following on from the retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale, Bitter Greens. This time, Forsyth focuses not so much on the fairy tales, but those who famously collected the old tales - the Brothers Grimm. More specifically, this story is focused around a woman whom history has shadowed, Henriette Dorothea Wild, known as Dortchen Wild.

Dortchen Wild grew up next to the Grimm family in the German kingdom of Hessen-Kassel, the Kate Forsyth once again delves into the world of fairy tales, The Wild Girl following on from the retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale, Bitter Greens. This time, Forsyth focuses not so much on the fairy tales, but those who famously collected the old tales - the Brothers Grimm. More specifically, this story is focused around a woman whom history has shadowed, Henriette Dorothea Wild, known as Dortchen Wild.

Dortchen Wild grew up next to the Grimm family in the German kingdom of Hessen-Kassel, the kingdom itself subject to the rise and fall of the Napoleonic wars. Wild herself was the source of many of the tales that the Grimm brothers collected, and went on to marry Wilhelm.

In The Wild Girl, Forsyth gives Dortchen Wild the life that history leaves out. Dortchen is the wild girl, headstrong by nature, and happiest in the gardens and wild places. From the first, she finds herself drawn to Wilhelm, though she knows that her father would never allow them to marry, for the Grimms are too poor.

As Dortchen's life progresses, the lightness and wildness of her youth are thrown into shadow. And a fair warning needs to go here - there is physical and sexual abuse in this book, which may be triggering for some readers. But there is also much redemption - Dortchen herself speaks about the redemptive power of story, and the novel itself is a fine example of how powerfully a story can redeem and bring light.

The prose in this novel is utterly beautiful. At times, it is pared back so much that it seems almost plain (though always serviceable), but then Forsyth inserts an almost painfully beautiful phrase or image. Everything feels real - the huge events of history that pass around Dortchen's life, seen only in fragments by her are nonetheless full of impact. Forsyth manages to convey perfectly how an event like a war affects people on the individual level as Dortchen and her family live and grow (and sometimes fall).

There is a lot of darkness in this novel, just as there is darkness in so many of the fairy tales gathered by the Grimm brothers (and the parts of the tales that are woven into this story do a fabulous job of reflecting that). But just as in the fairy tales, even in darkness there is always hope.

An absolutely beautiful and much recommended read. An extremely worthy follow-up to Bitter Greens.

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Feb 11, 2014 Magdalena added it

There have been a great many novels built on the imagined secondary characters in the lives of literary giants like Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austin, Keats, and so on, but The Wild Girl, is the first time I’ve ever come across a novel that picks up on the Grimm brothers. There is something particularly special about this, because fairy tales are a kind of uber-literature, forming, orally, some of the earliest tales. They not only underpin much of modern literature in one way or another with the There have been a great many novels built on the imagined secondary characters in the lives of literary giants like Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austin, Keats, and so on, but The Wild Girl, is the first time I’ve ever come across a novel that picks up on the Grimm brothers. There is something particularly special about this, because fairy tales are a kind of uber-literature, forming, orally, some of the earliest tales. They not only underpin much of modern literature in one way or another with their classic themes and conflicts that have been re-adapted in so many ways, they explore, in all sorts of metaphoric ways, the heart of what it means to be human. Though I have no idea what happened to them, I remember collecting Andrew Lang’s coloured fairy books as a child – and the excitement they caused me – from the jewel coloured covers to the beautiful plate illustrations and often dramatic and scary stories full of anxiety and triumph.

Kate Forsyth’s The Wild Girl picks up on the magic and classic appeal of the fairy tale, not only because of its subject matter, which builds on the thin threads we have of Wilhelm Grimm’s long standing romance with Dortchen Wild, the young woman who tells him many of his most enduring fairy tales, and who later becomes his wife, but also in its own unfolding, which is, in itself, a kind of fairy tale. The names of these characters alone would be enough to inspire a novel, but Forsyth goes deeper, exploring a range of themes that includes the impact of tyranny (shown on multiple levels – both domestic and historical), emotional strength and weakness as manifested in drug addiction and prejudice, and the enduring power of the human spirit and love even when under great duress. In short, The Wild Girl is a novel that speaks, like the fairy tales that are woven deftly throughout the narrative, to the very nature of human existence in all of its frailties and strengths.

The research for The Wild Girl is clearly extensive, and though it is the ongoing love story between Dortchen and Wilhelm that drives the narrative, it’s impossible not to be caught up in the Napoleonic Wars that form the historical backdrop for the novel. Forsyth does a beautiful job of marrying the impact of the war on Hessen-Cassel, the German town that Dortchen and Grimm grow up in, with the day to day domestics of running these households:

It had been a year since the French army had marched into Hessen-Cassel. Many things had changed for Dortchen in that time. She was now fourteen and a half, and confined within stays that compressed her ribs and made her feel like she could not breathe. Her hair no longer swung free in a long plait but was curbed with a fistful of pins. She no longer went to school but stayed at home helping her mother and sisters. Worst of all, she was no longer allowed to go out into the forest by herself, or even to the garden plot outside the town walls. (88)

We watch Dortchen grow up, through the hardships and privations that come with the war, through her mother’s illness and her father’s increasing tyranny. Dortchen’s father creates his own reign of terror and the mirroring of the political with the domestic is handled so deftly, that the reader feels it viscerally rather than experiences it intellectually. As Napoleon turns Hessen-Cassel into the Kingdom of Westphalia and puts his profligate brother Jérôme’s in charge. Jérôme proceeds to live to excess, holding grand balls while the population starves. All of this is seen through Dortchen’s eyes as she comes of age through it the lens of the fairy tales she tells to Wilhelm. An excerpt of many of these tales prefix each chapter, and while the reader becomes engrossed in Dortchen’s and Wilhelm’s personal stories, we never lose sight of the mythological, larger canvas or the fairytale nature of their own lives which are also mirrored in the stories. Though the setting is absolutely realistic, rich with detail, from the herbs that Dortchen gathers in the forest, to the war and its impact, the gritty painful incidents at home, her mother’s illness, Wilhelm’s brother’s addiction, the real-life characters who people this novel, from Goethe to the dramatic Bettina Brentano, and the beauty of the natural world, there is also a sense of magic that underlies the work. There is the transformative nature of the fairy tale as the stories begin to follow Dortchen’s personal character arc. Dortchen’s influence over the stories is a powerful one, and as she convinces Wilhelm to retell the stories in a way that’s more affirmative and universally palatable, allowing light to overcome darkness, she also begins to remake her own story. The Wild Girl is a visually beautiful novel that provides a meta-poetic retelling of the Grimms’ legend in a way that is both modern and classic.

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Dec 27, 2014 Tracey rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2014, australian, historical, fiction, romance, war

I had read Bitter Greens and have been looking forward to reading The Wild Girl over Christmas.
After finishing the book I really had to sit down and think about this one. Part of this book are extraordinary, the descriptions, the characters, the historical details are wonderful.
The novel is a marvellous at bringing to life Dortchen Wild who is credited with providing the Grimm’s brothers with a quarter of their fairy tales. Forysth has attempted to reimagine the world of the Wilds and the Grimm ...more

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