LIT LISTS: Five wild girls of literature

Monday, January 20, 2025

Five wild girls of literature

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's most recent collection of fiction, What We Do with the Wreckage, won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her two previous collections are Swimming with Strangers and This Life She’s Chosen, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick of the Month.

Elita is her first novel. She lives near Seattle.

At Lit Hub Lunstrum tagged five works of literature featuring wild children, including:

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

No account of the literature of the wild nature of the child is complete without Marilynne Robinson’s canonical masterpiece. Here, in a Pacific Northwest landscape as untameable as the novel’s characters, the reader sinks into the fog of orphaned narrator Ruth’s adolescence and the year her aunt Sylvie comes to care for her and her sister Lucille. Ruth and Lucille form perfect opposites—Lucille moved by the sisters’ impoverished and uncertain childhood to mold herself into a model of adult stability and social acceptance; while Ruth is towed as if by invisible undercurrent away from all that, toward the mountains and the lake that define their Idaho town, toward Sylvie’s strange reveries and feral tendencies. The house these three keep is a house of silent, creeping discord, as Sylvie abandons typical caretaking routines in favor of tending her wild mind instead, and Ruth—unable to resist all that is also wild in her—follows. In Housekeeping, the question that drives the story is not how to hold onto the self but rather how to let it go that one might become absorbed, like Sylvie (whose name alone connotes her essential belonging in the wild) and the fog itself, into the true freedom of the larger world.