In ‘The Wild Girl’, Kate Forsyth delivers a breathtakingly epic historic romance that imagines the relationship between Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild – set against the Napoleonic Wars and during a time of great hardship and uncertainty for the German people. Wilhelm Grimm went on to marry Dortchen Wild, in 1825. They lived happily ever after with Wilhelm's elder brother Jakob for the rest of their lives.Ī margins note appears in the personal copy of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm’s ‘Hänsel und Grethel’ – which reveals that in 1813 Henriette Dorothea (Dortchen) Wild contributed the children's verse answer to the witch, 'The wind, the wind,/ The heavenly child,' which rhymes in German: 'Der Wind, der Wind,/ Das himmlische Kind.' It is likely that the Grimms heard the entire story in the Wild household. Even after the death of her father, Dortchen and Wilhelm could not marry – the Grimm brothers were so poor they were surviving on a single meal a day.Īfter the overthrow of Napoleon and the eventual success of the fairytale collection, Dortchen and Wilhelm were at last able to marry. All the other sisters married and moved away, but Dortchen had to stay home and care for her sick parents. Dortchen had to meet Wilhelm in secret to tell him her stories. He frowned on the friendship between his daughters and the poverty-stricken Grimm Brothers. Dortchen was the source of many of the tales in the Grimm brother's first collection of fairy tales, which was published in 1812, the year of Napoleon's disastrous march on Russia.ĭortchen's own father was cruel and autocratic, and he beat and abused her. The Grimm brothers began collecting fairytales that year, wanting to save the old stories told in spinning-circles and by the fire from the domination of French culture. Napoleon created a new Kingdom of Westphalia, under the rule of his dissolute young brother Jérôme. In 1806, Hesse-Cassel was invaded by the French.

Dortchen was the same age as Lotte Grimm, the only girl in the Grimm family, and the two became best friends.

One of six sisters, Dortchen lived in the medieval quarter of Cassel, a town famous for its grand royal palace, its colossal statue of Herkules, and a fairytale castle of turrets and spires built as a love nest for the Prince-Elector's mistress. Growing up next door to the Grimm brothers in Hesse-Cassel, a small German kingdom, Dortchen told Wilhelm some of the most powerful and compelling stories in the famous fairytale collection.ĭortchen first met the Grimm brothers in 1805, when she was twelve. The Wild Girl tells the story of Dortchen Wild. One of the great untold love stories - how the Grimm brothers discovered their famous fairy tales - filled with drama and passion, and taking place during the Napoleonic Wars.

The Wild Girl by Kate Forsyth