“Wild by name and wild by nature,” Dortchen’s father used to say of her. He did not mean it as a compliment. He thought her headstrong, and so he set himself to tame her.
I picked up The Wild Girl because it was mentioned in a nonfiction book I recently read about the storytellers behind famous fairy tales (The Fairy Tellers), and focussed as it is on the story of Dortchen Wild — a childhood neighbour of the Brothers Grimm and the eventual wife of one of them — author Kate Forsyth does a wonderful job of bringing her research to life. Set during the Napoleonic Wars (it was the years-long French occupation that prompted the Grimms to collect and preserve German folklore), this is a rich and exciting time period for a romantic Historical Fiction, and while I was never bored by the details, I didn’t find this particularly literary. I am delighted that this book brings Dortchen’s contributions into the light (hers is the first known version of “Hansel and Gretel” to feature a gingerbread house; why wouldn’t we know her name?), this was certainly not a waste of my time, just not entirely to my tastes.
As she put her cloak on and gathered up her jug and bowls, Wilhelm said to her, “I’d like to hear one of your stories some time. I’m interested in old stories and songs and such things. Friends of mine are collecting folk songs at the moment, for a book they are writing. Do you and your sisters know any songs?”
Because Forsyth has a PhD in Fairy Tale Studies and based this novel on documents that she uncovered and translated, I understand why she would feel the need to include the entire period between the meeting of Dortchen Wild and Wilhelm Grimm and their eventual marriage (twenty-some years later), but the result felt both too long (at 500 pages) and too shallow (skipping months and years ahead at a time). It really is a fascinating time period that Forsyth got to work with here, but it often led to infodumping in a nonorganic manner: would young Dortchen really be thinking the following as she learns Napoleon is marching towards Hessen-Cassel?
Dortchen thought of the Holy Roman Empire. So many tiny countries stitched together into a patchwork eiderdown, each with its own archduke or archbishop, prince or landgrave, squabbling over borders and taxes and rights of privilege, each with their own weights and measures, their own laws and curfews. Some of the princedoms were so small that they could fire at each other from their castle walls. Yet for over a millennium they had held together. What would happen now a few of those stitches were torn loose? Would the whole patchwork unravel?
Forsyth namedrops Beethoven and Goethe and Admiral Nelson, features balls at the palace, the “Year Without a Summer”, and a typhoid epidemic, but the historical highlights are the frequent reports of Napoleon (the “Ogre”) and his uncanny military strategy. After Jérome Napoleon was installed as the King of Westphalia (and locals began to wonder if maybe they weren’t better off under the new Napoleonic Codes), the wars raged on for years and years until finally, it would seem, the Little Emperor had even taken Moscow. As the daughter of the town Apothecary, there is also much rich detail about harvesting and preparing natural remedies. And, of course, this is a bosom-heaving love story:
As Dortchen finished the tale, Wilhelm threw down his quill, caught her in his arms and kissed her. Despite herself, Dortchen fell back beneath him. Her mouth opened, her hands tangled in his hair and she welcomed his weight upon her. They kissed as if the world were about to end and this was all the chance of life left to them. They kissed as if they were starving and the other was all sustenance. Dortchen lost all sense of herself. There were only their mouths and their shy hands, and the brush of flesh against flesh.
It is recorded fact that Dortchen and Wilhelm didn’t get married until they were in their thirties (despite how unusual that would have been at the time), and interestingly, Forsyth looked for explanatory subtext in the fairy tales that Dortchen recited (particularly the disturbing “All Kinds of Fur”), writing in an afterword, “I built this novel by listening to the story within the stories that Dortchen told.” That decision led the plot in some unexpected directions (“unexpected”, but not unsupported by the premise; the subtext is in the stories), but stretching this courtship over a couple decades of will-they-won’t-they (when the reader knows they’ll eventually be married) became a little dull. Again, I am pleased that this exists: Dortchen’s name deserves to be known and Kate Forsyth has given her a whole life here.
For some reason, I thought that in The Fairy Tellers this was referred to as a "remarkable novel", but going back after being a bit underwhelmed by this, I see that he called this "beautiful". I do want to note that both the author of The Fairy Tellers, Nicholas Jubber, and the author of The Wild Girl, Kate Forsyth, cite Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales as "wonderful", and as a work of nonfiction, I might be inspired to look for it one day.
