The Wildness
Keer’s debut traverses our human connection with the natural environment through one woman who, in striving to reign in her inherent wildness, finds agency in nature’s comforting embrace. In late 18th-century pre-industrial rural Britain, Walter Sentance unexpectedly inherits Rose Maunt, raising him to the status of landed gentry. Pridefully surveying his multi-acre estate with a view to his unfolding future, he hires a Master of Works and landscape designer to develop his ‘windfall’ into a private Gentleman’s Park; anyone living on the property to be evicted, despite generations of family history.
Walter’s edict incorporates Haydle Bent, where Linnet Withycombe and daughter Jael reside in a small cottage, shielded by an ancient oak tree, the sentinel of centuries of change. Walter’s ambition to subordinate his land—no longer will ‘wayward wildness’ be tolerated—merges with his wish to subjugate his sometimes-improper wife, Hannah. Both should be beautiful, obedient, and maintained in good order. But the more Hannah roams through primitive bracken, boggy marshes and acres of undergrowth, the more attuned she becomes to nature’s seldom-heard murmurings and susurrations. Her soul yearns for freedom and occasional recklessness. Lonely and friendless, she stumbles into an unusual relationship with wise woman Linnet and non-binary Jael.
As she comes to accept there are ‘more things in heaven and earth’, she courteously protests Walter’s refusal to listen to the land, large tracts of which will not contemplate his alterations, exhibited in visible signs of intransigence as the workers discover to their detriment. Hannah’s character arc compliments a tentative friendship with the landscape artist, whose transformation keeps the reader off guard as we discover, along with Hannah, that our ‘dominion’ has taken us too far off course. This enchanting debut draws to a perfect and poignant conclusion.
