The Wild Girl

"This is a novel that was published in 2013 by an Australian novelist, Kate Forsyth. She did a lot of research and tells the life story of Dortchen Wild, who was one of the key contributors to the Brothers Grimm. She tracked down and dated the stories that Dortchen Wild told more accurately than any scholar had before. In the book, you really get the sense of the world that they lived in and the colour of that period, the bonnets and cravats and laudanum and candlelight, the Napoleonic invasions that made life very difficult for people living in Germany at the time. At the same time, Kate Forsyth has taken a lot of license in the storytelling. It’s very much a novel that addresses one of the core questions we have about Dortchen Wild. As far as we can tell from the letters and diaries and so on that she left behind, she was a very gentle person. She was in love with Wilhelm Grimm, one of the Brothers Grimm, and ended up marrying him. But she told these stories that are often incredibly dark. There are stories like “The Singing Bone”, where a murder victim’s bones tell the details of how they were murdered. There’s “Sweetheart Roland” where a girl is murdered in her bed by her mother, who is a witch and meant to kill her stepsister. You’ve got “The Six Swans” where a mother of newborn babies has blood smeared across her lips and she’s accused of eating them. “I’ve always loved fairy tales” How could this seemingly meek and mild person tell these very grisly tales? Kate Forsyth’s interpretation is that she was sexually abused by her father. He was certainly a very grumpy man. It’s a very harrowing part of the book, really hard to read, but powerful. Dortchen Wild and Wilhelm Grimm loved each other, they knew each other for a long time, but it took many, many years before they got married. Why was that? It’s a plausible explanation. What was even more powerful for me was seeing this character who struggles to accept that somebody loves her, the difficulty of receiving love when you feel that you’re unlovable. It’s incredibly moving. The book really left me in tears. Most of the stories came from a group of neighbouring young women. One of the things to remember is that the Grimms themselves were very young, in their early 20s, when they were collecting these stories. These women were in their late teens to early 20s. The stories that have survived and endured and have become the most popular are the stories that those young women told. Dortchen Wild was a key contributor and probably the most important. She told stories like “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” It’s a shame that she hasn’t been given much credit until very recently. There is another woman called Marie Hassenpflug who was also important. She told “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, for example."