There must be something in the air here in Australia. There are
all these women writing amazing fiction with fairy tale themes. I can think of
four without any trouble: Sophie
Masson, author of several YA novels based on such folk tales as Tattercoats, Sleeping
Beauty and, most recently,"Aschenputtel", the German version of “Cinderella”. Juliet
Marillier, author of the Sevenwaters series that began with Daughter Of The
Forest(“The Wild Swans”)
and Heart's Blood(“Beauty And The Beast”).
Margo Lanagan, with Tender Morsels (“Snow White And Rose Red”) and, of course, Sea
Hearts, which is on the Stella short
list, two sections of the Aurealises and the Ditmars. In the last year there
has been the Specusphere anthology, Mythic Resonance, which had folk tale-inspired stories both by women
and men.
And there's now Kate Forsyth, best known for her children's books, who has written two novels in a
row on fairy tale themes. Bitter Greens
(on both the Aurealis and Ditmars
list this year) was about the
young woman who wrote a version of the Rapunzel story back in the seventeenth
century, intertwined with the Rapunzel tale itself. That one was historical
fantasy; The Wild Girl is
straight historical fiction centred around those collectors of tales, the
Brothers Grimm, as seen by the girl next door, Dortchen Wild, who would
eventually marry one of them and told them about a quarter of the stories in
their collection. But the fairy tales are there anyway, again intertwined with
the main story, though not in exactly the same way as in Bitter
Greens. There are quotes from the stories
Dortchen Wild told Wilhelm Grimm, caerfully connected with whatever is
happening in that part of the novel.
Dortchen Wild, daughter of an apothecary and no mean herbalist
herself, falls in love with Wilhelm Grimm when she is just twelve and he a few
years older. He is the big brother of her best friend Lotte, kind and handsome
and probably doesn't know she exists, except as someone who knows many of the
folk tales he and his brother Jakob are collecting.
But the years go by. Napoleon invades. The small German country
of Hesse become the kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by Napoleon's extravagant and
heedless younger brother, Jerome. The Grimms and Dortchen's family
have a lot more to worry about than a romance that might or might not happen.
And Dortchen has been abused horribly by her father, one of the nastier
characters I have come across in fiction recently.
This is a wonderful piece of historical fiction. It is based on
an idea expressed by Valerie Paradiz in Clever Maids:The
Secret History Of The Grimm Fairy Tales, that the Grimm brothers got their
stories, not from illiterate peasants and old grannies at the spinning wheel,
but from middle class, educated young women of their acquaintance, starting
with the girl next door.
As with all good
historical fiction, history has been interpreted. There will always be some
things we don't know, and when that happens, the author has to pull together
the facts we do know and come to a conclusion. This has been done very well, so
that I read it and thought,"Yes, this could really be how it
happened." The author has taken only a few minor bits of license, which she
mentions in her afterword, but she has done it intelligently. She has researched the period and the people
thoroughly and made it all believable. It's strange, reading it, to imagine
that all this was going on while the Regency was happening in England and Jane
Austen was writing gentle, witty romances.
I hadn’t
realised that the first edition of the Grimm stories was a flop. Live and
learn!
Another thing: I
always thought the Grimm stories were nastier and more violent than their
counterparts in other countries, but this isn't always the case. While reading The
Wild Girl I was comparing Grimm stories
with those of Perrault and others. “Sleeping
Beauty” in Grimm ends with
the princess and her prince wandering off happily into the sunset; the French
Perrault story doesn't and with the princess awakening. She has a monster for a
mother-in-law - literally! One who tries to eat her and her children. “Aschenputtel” has some gruesome bits, but at
least Grimm's Cinderella isn't a murderer like her Italian counterpart, Cenerentola,
whom I discovered on Sur La Lune
Fairy Tales. The story of “Little
Red Riding Hood” is nastier
in the French version.
Whether you love fairy tales or historical fiction or romance,
there is something for you in The Wild Girl.
Available now in all good bookshops in Australia or you can buy it online here. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can get it in the iBooks store.
