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”.
The novel is a slow-burner, and Bromwich has the confidence to allow her story to build incrementally through the early chapters. Laura begins an affair with Vincenzo, a handsome waiter from the local cafe, who, like her, is an outsider by virtue of not being native to the village, though he has lived there since his youth; with him she can be both animal and woman. Snippets of Laura’s mysterious past are dropped teasingly into this first section; we learn that she was once married, that she has lived in France, that she has reverted to her mother’s maiden name.
There are strong echoes of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as more of her story is revealed, until two incidents coincide to shatter her uneasy peace: a friend from the life she has fled appears at her door, just as she is struck down by a near-fatal fever. Both experiences change her fundamentally and mark a point of no return; the past has intruded into the present, and her independence is compromised by the loss of her physical strength.
Bromwich has written movingly for this paper about her experience of long Covid, and her depiction of Laura’s pain and frustration at the failure of her body has the sharp clarity of inside knowledge: “Beyond a certain point, when sympathy has fallen away, pain becomes distasteful to others…” As Laura becomes stranger and wilder, experiencing the forest as a hallucinatory vision, so the villagers’ suspicion turns to fear, and then to violence. Is she santa or strega, saint or witch? These seem to be the only alternatives for a woman who is neither wife nor mother.
At the Edge of the Woods is a novel that invites full immersion on the reader’s part; the reward is a deeply unsettling exploration of what it means to inhabit a female body but to reject femininity, and to feel a connection with the natural world that embodies both awe and terror. In this, its themes could not be more timely.
• At the Edge of the Woods by Kathryn Bromwich is published by Two Dollar Radio (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
