Kathryn Bromwich’s accomplished debut novel begins in a deceptively pastoral register. Her narrator, Laura, is an educated woman who has purposefully removed herself from society to rent a tumbledown cabin in a forest in the mountains of northern Italy. On her first encounter with the reader she presents herself with all the tropes of a fairytale crone: she walks up the mountain at dawn, wrapped in “layer upon layer of coarse, heavy clothing”. She is conscious of how she appears to the few people who pass her on the mountain paths: “all matted fabric and dirt and ill-concealed truculence”, and yet, alone in the natural world, she can sometimes achieve a state of transcendence that is denied her in the nearby village, where “I make myself smaller, softer, amenable to human interaction”.
Despite the pleasure Laura takes in allowing herself to become semi-feral in her solitude, she depends on not alienating the villagers, who give her piecemeal work, with her strangeness: “I endeavour to maintain a veneer of respectability: cleanliness, manners, a subdued demeanour toward men.” The exact period of the story is left unclear, adding to the folkloric sense of timelessness, but there are enough clues to place it in the early 20th century: Laura has a laudanum habit, her cabin was previously occupied by a soldier rumoured to be a conscientious objector. Whatever the exact year, it’s an age in which a woman choosing to live alone in a forest attracts first gossip and then suspicion from a conservative rural community, particularly if – matted fabric notwithstanding – she is not yet 40 and “remnants of my beauty flash through on occasion”.
