Gone to Earth

Hazel Woodus belongs to the hills and forests of Shropshire, not to the parlors and pews of polite society. In her wild, untamed heart, she finds the fox cub more honest than any man who courts her, more predictable than the rules that bound the village women. When the squire of the manor and the local minister both pursue her, Hazel cannot parse what they want from what they mean, and her innocence becomes a kind of blindness that will lead to ruin. Mary Webb wrote this novel in 1917 with a poet's ferocity and a naturalist's eye, crafting a heroine so alive to the earth's rhythms that civilization appears as the true wilderness. Gone to Earth is a tragic romance, yes, but more fundamentally it is the story of a soul too wild for the cage it is offered.