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Atlantic
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Who's Afraid of These Strange, Secretive Sisters?
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.
Washington Post
06-08-2025
- Washington Post
In this novel, five sisters are turning into dogs. Or are they?
In 1701, a real doctor named John Friend published a curious account in a scientific journal. The year before, he wrote, a rumor spread that a group of girls in the Oxfordshire countryside, west of London, 'had been seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs.' Friend's report is the inspiration for 'The Hounding,' writer Xenobe Purvis's tense and absorbing debut novel about a village upended by fear of a group of girls who may be possessed by supernatural spirits.
New York Times
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
5 Eerie Sisters Who Morph Into Dogs? This Town Has Even More to Fear.
THE HOUNDING, by Xenobe Purvis Welcome to Little Nettlebed, England, where the 'season of strangeness' has begun. Heat is addling every resident's mind, priming them to feel indiscriminate rage — toward even 'the sound of the birds, the air on their skin.' A sturgeon, huge and unholy, is found beached along the shrinking river. And there are the Mansfield girls — five orphaned, aloof sisters in mourning, whose self-possession and inscrutable mien make their neighbors uneasy. The local drunk, a misogynistic ferryman named Pete Darling, swears he's seen them transform into a pack of dogs, and before long, news of his dubious vision has bolted around town. Xenobe Purvis's outstanding debut novel, 'The Hounding,' unfolds in 1700s Oxfordshire, but the atmosphere of paranoia and bloodthirsty groupthink often feels uncomfortably familiar. The Mansfields — Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Grace and Mary, so close that their names spoken aloud sound like an incantation, or a prayer — live just beyond town with their grandfather Joseph, a recent widower. Half-blind and benevolent, like a sweetly fictionalized John Milton, Joseph presides over what once was a happy, liberated farm. His wife had a fiercely independent streak: a point of pride for Joseph, and a trait they nurtured in their granddaughters. Now his greatest wish is to protect the girls from malign incursions, and he's right to worry — beyond his home is 'a ravenous world, a world with teeth.' True to its name, there's an ominous air throughout Little Nettlebed. 'If violence was their god, then the alehouse was their church,' Purvis writes of the villagers. No one models this better than Pete Darling, who is prone to visitations from angels and vaguely biblical dreams while recovering from a bender. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Spectator
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A season of strangeness: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, reviewed
'Summer was the season of strangeness,' muses Temperance, the barmaid at Little Nettlebed's only alehouse. 'People behaved peculiarly then.' Temperance's aside anchors the dramatic irony at the heart of Xenobe Purvis's debut novel The Hounding, set in an 18th-century Oxfordshire village in the grip of a drought. In the villagers' eyes, through which much of the story is told, this strangeness starts with the Mansfield sisters, five orphaned girls leading a reclusive life on a farm across the river, in the sole care of their blind grandfather, John. The girls' free manners, in flippant disregard of the era's orthodoxies, fill onlookers with mistrust. To us, however, the sisters are simply girls being girls, and the strangeness rather stems from the villagers' outdated mindset. The ferryman, Pete, resents the sisters for their lack of meekness and, even more humiliatingly, for afflicting him with 'unclean thoughts'. But, it is implied, he also blames them for his other grievances, from the heat-guzzled river – which the villagers will soon be able to cross by foot, making his services superfluous – to his impending wedding to a woman he dislikes. In the words of Thomas, John Mansfield's young farmhand, the sisters are held 'responsible for a lot of things'. Pete's obsession festers and mounts, until one night he claims to have spotted the girls turn into feral dogs. The rumour spreads like wildfire and the villagers close ranks. Such a reversal of logic – by which the true horror resides not in the possibility that a girl might shapeshift into a rabid hound, but in the villagers' consensus that self-reliant women have got to have something wrong with them – is trumpeted in the blurb: 'It is safer to be a wild animal than an unconventional young woman.' It's a valid point, but it's been brought home in witch-hunty books so often that it now feels a bit tired. Purvis, who was inspired by a 'real case of five barking girls', does an excellent job of sketching swampy settings and folk-gothic atmospheres. For Temperance's development alone, from prim bystander to a freethinking agent with a dark inner life (see her awakening to the fiendish temptation of alcohol, the poison that killed her father), the novel is worth reading. And it's a safe bet: you know what the characters are getting into from the first page, and the summer publication is also auspicious. The Hounding is the perfect holiday book.
