Woman, Wilderness, Will

On the tenth of February, 1675, Mary Rowlandson watched Lancaster burn. Within the hour she would lose a sister, a brother-in-law, and a nephew to the raid, and within nine days she would bury her own six-year-old daughter in ground she was not permitted to mark. What followed - eleven weeks and five days force-marched through the New England wilderness as the property of a Narragansett sagamore's household - became one of the founding texts of American captivity literature. This novel reimagines that ordeal in the psychologically unsparing third person, tracing a woman who arrived in the wilderness a minister's compliant wife and left it something considerably harder to categorize.

What makes Mary's story startling, even now, is not simply what was done to her but what she did with it. Stripped of a husband, a household, and every social scaffold that had defined her, she built a functioning economy out of nothing but a needle and her own nerve - bartering shirts and stockings for food, currency, and standing, until she had made herself, by any practical measure, indispensable to her own captors. When the moment came to name her own ransom, it was Mary, not her absent husband, who stood before the Sagamores' council and set the price. She negotiated. She calculated. She survived on her own reckoning, not anyone else's mercy - a woman whose voice, once she finally set the whole of it down, refused to stay confined to the modest margins her century had assigned her.

Precise, unsentimental, and alive to every contradiction in its narrator, this is a story about what a woman discovers about her own capacity when the world that told her who she was burns down around her.