Lauren Groff’s early fiction was concerned with the ways in which stories from the past lie partially visible beneath the surface of the present, threatening to erupt and disrupt. After the breakthrough success of her third novel, Fates and Furies in 2015, her perspective shifted; her follow-up, Matrix, was set firmly in a distant past – a 12th-century English convent – but told a story shot through with resonances for a modern world.
Her new novel shares much common ground with its immediate predecessor. Like Matrix, it tells the story of a young woman, born an outsider in a turbulent age, fiercely determined to survive in the face of pitiless forces arrayed against her. But where Matrix considered the power of community, The Vaster Wilds – set in the new world in the early years of the 17th century – deals with its failure. The heroine, a young woman who is “but sixteen or seventeen or perhaps eighteen years of age”, has fled the English settlement at Jamestown to undertake a perilous journey north through a hostile winter landscape, though the dangers she faces alone in the wilderness are no worse, she reasons, than those she has left behind. The settlement is under siege, its inhabitants dying of starvation, and everywhere she finds the same threat posed to women by men: “For even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears”.
