Wilderness Child: When a Child Is Abandoned on Her Family's Farm During the Great Plague of 1350, an Old-Time Storyteller, a Raven, a Cat and a Dog Tell Her Archetypal Irish Tale.

Barbara Allan Hite

Nov 2013 · Trafford Publishing

About this ebook

Throughout the ages, histories and folk tales pop up to tell us about children, even infants, who grow up without the care and supervision of human adults. These lost ones, so it goes, must have been nurtured by wolves or other miraculous caregivers, and whether actual or fabricated, these stories with their possibilities of totally fantastical outcomes, intrigue us deeply. We wonder: Exactly how did such children survive? What conditions or circumstances might be required? What would they do if their humans found them? Could or would they eventually grow up to lead "normal" lives? WILDERNESS CHILD is an imagined story inspired by a true incident from the Bubonic Plague of 1350.

About the author

In WILDERNESS CHILD, playwright and novelist Barbara Hite shows her usual loving respect for and understanding of her young heroin and the creatures who fill her life. Hite, mother of three, spent her professional life as an English teacher in middle and upper level educational systems; she also studied biology and worked with animal rescue groups in her Norfolk, VA home. Here, in her latest novel, Hite demonstrates again her uncanny ability to describe typical animal and human behaviors in accurate, unsentimental terms, and, though the story itself has the flavor of an old folk tale, it raises questions about women's choices in the world today.