Something is rotten in the village of Little Nettlebed. There isn’t enough rain. A sturgeon of ungodly proportions has been beached on the bank of the Thames. Worse, five sisters have tried to save its life, defying both the mysterious beneficence that brought the fish to shore and local norms dictating that it must be killed for food. In the glow of the late-afternoon sun, the world is no longer beautiful. Instead, it is sickly, the light “jaundicing the saucers of white flowers” on an elder tree.
It is the early 18th century in Oxfordshire, England, and readers likely know how this story goes: A “season of strangeness” begins, and the witch, or witches, who are responsible must be found. Except it goes weirder, and wilder, in Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel, The Hounding. The suspected witches in question—those five sisters—stand accused of transgressing nature by transforming not the world around them but their own bodies. The local ferryman, a perpetually inebriated and aggrieved man called Pete Darling, is convinced that he has seen them turn into dogs—and soon, almost everyone else in the drought-stricken village will come to believe him.
The bluntness of Purvis’s title, which refers both to the girls transforming into dogs and to their neighbors taking up the hunt, is a hint: This is not a novel particularly interested in nuance. Instead, it wants to directly engage the subtext of all witch stories, in which femininity itself is perceived as a menace, and to try to understand why women are often seen as natural conduits for unnatural forces. Hence the sisters—because if a woman is strange and unnerving, a group of them connected by the inherited bonds that link sisters is even more so.
And oh, are these sisters strange. They are pale and aloof. They are prone to playing harmless but cruel tricks on people outside their own tight circle. They are largely indiscernible from one another, despite a helpful guide in the book’s second paragraph. (Mary is the baby; Grace, the shy one; Hester, the tomboy; Elizabeth, the beauty; Anne, the eldest, unpredictable and independent.) Even their grandfather, the sole responsible adult in their lives, cannot quite distinguish their faces through his deteriorating eyesight. To others, they always appear as an odd unit.
They seem to speak a secret, frequently nonverbal language—one observed with fascination by Thomas, a hired man with only brothers, who becomes preoccupied with “their spiritedness and singularity, the way rumours around them bred.” They refuse to honor the etiquette of village life, a violation that triggers first Pete Darling’s suspicion and then his rage. Robin Wildgoose, a local young man who is, like the sisters, not quite built to the village form, finds the fivesome a sticking point in his efforts to fit in. He likes them, but joining the collective dislike of them is a tempting route toward acceptance.
The novel is told through the perspectives of these men—Thomas, Pete, Robin—and that of Joseph, the girls’ grandfather, and Temperance, the local pub owner’s wife. The result is a refracted view: five girls seen by five curious outsiders who each learn something about themselves as they watch.
This is an old function of sisters in literature: They serve as a mystical sort of test for other, more central characters, usually men. The weird sisters of Macbeth show a once-honorable Scotsman that he is power-mad and disloyal. In early Arthurian legend, nine sorceress sisters, including Morgan le Fay, are fascinating and fearsome foes that test the mettle of knights and noblemen. And in the classic fairy tale “The 12 Dancing Princesses,” the man who solves the riddle of the titular sisters’ nocturnal adventures is an old soldier, who wins a royal wife after many princes have died trying.
The Hounding transparently engages with that history; it is full of invocations of the sisters of fiction. As in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the second-eldest of five sisters is named Elizabeth. The girls’ last name is Mansfield, as in Austen’s Mansfield Park, a novel that arguably features one of the most provocatively unsympathetic pairs of sisters ever put to page. Purvis also makes sly references to other fictional women who have served as a moral foil; the nearly feral Hester, for instance, evokes Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter. The novel is daring readers to see past the stereotypes, while also trying to showcase their allure.
It only partially works. Purvis writes with a kind of lush violence that makes the sisters’ experiences feel immediate and fresh. Hester is struck with fury upon the arrival of her first period, and takes to climbing trees and sobbing in protest. She’d rather be a pebble, says Anne, because “pebbles look very peaceful and are unencumbered by ugly things like blood and breasts.” This scene is key to understanding exactly what Purvis is after: She is taking the idea of women’s bodies changing or behaving in alien ways to an extreme, and satirizing the cultural inclination to fear them.
Purvis leaves ambiguous whether the girls’ transformation into dogs is real or something of a collective hallucination. But so long as the sisters aren’t hurting anyone—beyond, perhaps, a few small slain animals—the novel asks why anyone should be so intensely afraid of them. The possibility of girls mutating into animals is certainly alarming, a startling aberration from the natural order; even the sisters’ defenders struggle with squeamishness and suspicion once the hearsay starts to spread. But The Hounding questions why that alarm should curdle so quickly into animosity. Is the escalation, perhaps, a consequence of the fact that womanhood has always been threatening to some, and the rumor of the sisters’ transfiguration gives the Pete Darlings of the world an acceptable outlet for their hatred?
Like many good questions, these ones risk inviting well-worn answers. In an indelible, grotesque scene, six young pregnant women are forced to carry the coffin of a peer who died in childbirth, as a ritual reminder of the fate that might soon await them. Unfortunately, that scene is capped by Temperance’s musings about “the great, gruelling trial of being a woman in a world governed by men”—a nail hit too bluntly on the head. As the rumors about the girls spread, Robin Wildgoose thinks that girls “who became dogs, or who let the world believe they were dogs, were either powerful or mad: both monstrous possibilities.” The implied criticism of the idea that a girl must care what others think of her is both trenchant and tired.
I wish there were more stories about persecuted women that don’t lose a bit of steam due to predictability. But the inevitability of some triteness is perhaps, itself, part of what Purvis is trying to illustrate. Joseph thinks to himself that he’d “rather they were dogs than damaged girls”; after all, being a dog might be safer. People “dreaded and pursued them and might eventually ruin them,” Thomas reflects, as he falls deeper under the sisters’ charms. “No other girls in history had ever met with such a fate.”
Of course, he’s wrong about that. And yet. Although the novel reaches old conclusions about its old subject—that many girls in history have been unjustly persecuted, and many more will be—it did give me something new to think about. I found it in the image of that gargantuan sturgeon gasping on the riverbank, surrounded by onlookers torn between their yearning to tear into its flesh and their revulsion at its animal strangeness. The asphyxiating creature “was as thick and muscular as a man’s torso,” Purvis writes; “From its face trailed long, white whiskers, twining and coiling like sea snakes.” After the girls make their ill-fated attempt to save the fish, Pete stomps on its head.
We are all just creatures in a world that can turn against us at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. The rains can stop. The river can dry up. The route that once was safe will be safe no longer. Someone might see our beauty; someone else might want to crush the life right out of us. The Mansfield sisters show that writing a new story can be difficult. But they also reveal that the old story is new in every fresh life that it touches, that understanding a trope is not the same as being protected from it, and that persecution feels like a startling new invention when it comes for you—whether you’re a fish, a dog, or a girl.
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