The Vaster Wilds is Lauren Groff’s latest novel. It is a beautifully written but bleak story about a girl trying to survive on her own in the wilderness. Compared to Groff’s other novels, The Vaster Wilds is a despairing read.

The girl, who is unnamed throughout most of the novel, has fled the English settlement in the New World where she lived with her mistress and her mistress’s family. The girl has fled because starvation and smallpox are decimating the settlement, but there are hints of a more ominous reason for her departure and why the settlement would send a man in pursuit of her.  

The girl has a strong will to live, which helps her survive in the cold, snowy wilderness full of dangerous animals and the Indigenous peoples who inhabit the land, who she is terrified of even though they are not a threat to her and see her as an amusing oddity. She learns how to build a shelter and how to forage for food – she literally eats anything that looks edible, like grubs and baby squirrels, which she cooks on a spit over her fire. ☹

Through the girl’s reminiscing, we learn about her life before she ended up in the wilderness, when she was an orphan in a poorhouse in London before being brought to her mistress’s home at the age of four to be the mistress’s servant. There she is taught to be an amusement for her mistress and her guests, and to take care of the mistress’s daughter, who is beautiful but has an intellectual disability, but her mistress does not care enough about the girl to protect her from the misdeeds of men. After her mistress marries her second husband, a handsome but sinister minister who decides to go to the New World, the girl finds herself on a ship before she even has an opportunity to think about whether she wants to go.

The Vaster Wilds is a story about how women must learn to navigate and survive the vast wilderness of a world that is controlled by men, but it is also a story about humankind’s relationship with nature. Nature becomes another character in the novel as it shows both kindness and cruelty towards the girl. When she has a moment to pause in her struggle to survive, she begins to see the beauty of the wilderness, a beauty that her English brethren burn and destroy in order to build their settlements. But just because we can see the beauty in nature, it does not mean we really appreciate it. Nature is just something that we take and take from because our own survival, our own comfort is most important. The thing about nature, though, is that it was here long before we ever showed up, and even after we are done taking all we can from it, nature will still be around when we are long gone.