A To Z Blogging Challenge 2023: Folk Tale And Myth In Fiction - F Is For Kate Forsyth

 Aussie author Kate Forsyth has written a lot of fairy tale themed fiction, but I will just speak of a few here, books I have read and loved. 

Her novel The Wild Girl isn’t about a single fairy tale, but about the Brothers Grimm, collectors of fairy tales and Dortchen Wild, the girl next door who told them some of their classic stories - and married Wilhelm Grimm. There is this idea that they got their stories from wise old peasant women, but in fact, they heard them from middle class young women. In all fairness, those girls probably got the stories from their nurses, but still…

The era in which the novel is set is when Napoleon was making his siblings Kings and Queens. In this case, it was his brother Jerome, who became the king of Westphalia, which was made up of some of northwest Germany, where the Grimms lived. 

It’s a powerful story, with the fairy tales at its centre. It feels strange to think that all the dreadful things people had to put up with under Napoleon were happening while Jane Austen’s characters were rattling teacups in Regency England.

Bitter Greens is a thick-as-a-brick novel based on the fairy tale “Rapunzel”. It is about the historical author of the fairy tale, originally called “Persinette”. Her name was Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force, a French aristocrat. In the novel, she has been exiled to a convent, where she meets a mysterious nun who tells her the story.

In this novel, the “witch” is a former artist’s model in Renaissance Venice. 

The story of Rapunzel is woven in with that of Charlotte-Rose. A fascinating and intriguing novel!

The Beast’s Garden takes the Grimm fairy tale “The Singing Springing Lark” and sets it in Nazi Germany. This fairy tale starts as “Beauty And The Beast” and becomes “East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon”. In it, the heroine marries a man enchanted to be a lion. As usual in this sort of tale, she breaks the rules he gives her and he turns into a bird and flies off. She follows, but when she finds him, he is engaged to a princess who isn’t giving him up. She eventually gets him back via some magical items she was given along the way, handed to the princess in exchange for spending a night with him. But the fiancée drugs him each night to make sure he sleeps and doesn’t see the heroine…

Kate Forsyth’s heroine is an opera singer whose family had helped their Jewish neighbours. She hates the Nazis. She first meets Leo(lion, get it?) on Kristallnacht, when he is there as an SS officer, whom she tells off. However, Leo helps the family and she learns that he is in on one of the attempts to kill Hitler. The attempt fails, of course - they all did - and he is sent to Flossenburg, a concentration camp(a real place, my Dad was imprisoned there). I won’t say more, due to spoilers, but I do recommend this. 

In fact, I would recommend anything by this author.