Kate Forsyth

The Wild Girl Kate Forsyth

The Wild Girl is based on a true story, one of the great untold love stories—how the Grimm brothers discovered their famous fairy tales. Its filled with drama and passion and takes place during the Napoleonic Wars. Dortchen Wild fell in love with Wilhelm Grimm the first time she saw him. Growing up in the small German kingdom of Hessen-Cassel in the early nineteenth century, Dortchen Wild is irresistibly drawn to the boy next door, the young and handsome fairy-tale scholar Wilhelm Grimm. It is a time of war, tyranny, and terror. Napoleon Bonaparte wants to conquer all Europe, and Hessen-Cassel is one of the first kingdoms to fall. Forced to live under oppressive French rule, the Grimm brothers decide to save old tales that had once been told by the firesides of houses grand and small all over the land. Dortchen knows many beautiful old stories—“Hansel and Gretel,†“The Frog King,†“Six Swans,†and others. As she tells them to Wilhelm, their love blossoms. But the Grimm family is desperately poor, and Dortchens father has other plans for his daughter. Marriage is an impossible dream. Dortchen can only hope that happy endings are not just the stuff of fairy tales.