Throughout Kathryn Bromwich’s debut novel, At the Edge of the Wood, strangeness
proliferates. We know little more for the first fifty pages than the fact that a lone woman lives in
a rundown hut, but Bromwich quickly entrances readers within her prose that wanders through a
woman’s solitude. She hikes everyday, running from something. It is in those trees that
Bromwich situates herself as a novelist keen on exploring perceptions, sustenance, and escape
into the natural world. Simple, insightful language occasionally dips into cliches that describe
the emotional turmoil of a scorned woman — such as her inner dialogue when she notes that
“[she] might be approaching something meaningful but just out of reach,” but is balanced with a
gritty focus on the body and the matter-of-fact narration. The first-person narration is not
entirely reliable, but readers quickly learn that they gain nothing from doubting her, an intriguing
opening conceit. With plenty of experimentation, perhaps the only continuity in this novel is the
feminist critique; in plot, characters, and form, Bromwich jumps from genre to genre before
landing on a combination of zen and retold-folklore.

This flexibility is both a strength and a tell of Bromwich’s newness to the form of the
novel. As a writer for publications such as The Observer, covering “all aspects of culture,”
Bromwich draws from a large vocabulary of mediums. For instance, in a quick dip into the
genre of religious dream visions, she writes, “I walk past the sports ground and find myself
drawn to the forbidden enclosure at the back, where children used to claim they had seen a statue
of Madonna weeping blood.” This flirtation with form after form is excellent at conveying the instability that drips over the novel as a whole. Bromwich does not exhaust genre or form before
moving onto the next, however, exhaustion may be of little importance to Bromwich — she
writes an unexpected four-page interlude that’s then followed by a ten-page chapter, all before
returning to her slower tempo— and the interruption is much needed. The dread of the novel
must be realized after we learn that the woman is running from an abusive husband and a
suffocating life; her reasons to retreat into the wilderness continue to haunt her, and remain a
silent shadow within her at all times. Hunted as a “strega,” an Italian translation of the folktale
witch, Bromwich subverts the evil witch stereotype of fairy tales — opting to let the woman rest
in her final witch form, rather than creating a saint out of an enraged woman.
Between the portrayal of an abusive relationship and the eventual witch-village dynamic,
Bromwich cements the mode of feminist critique that she intends to write: the novel
unapologetically focuses on standard Third Wave Feminism. The “woman” expands into
“women” as she gains her supernatural ability to see connections, paths, and natural patterns that
no one else can. She hears “the wails of women swell and surge until they fill the sky” and
tames wolves that attempt to protect her — but this does not happen all at once. Bromwich’s
narrator must first unlearn patterns such as her fixation on appearance, which, throughout her
candid writing, takes special note of how men and women treat her differently based on the
presentation of her femininity.

With each new iteration of the self, the narrator throws off another layer of pretense. A
novel with surprisingly linear growth, Bromwich disrupts expectations with an unhinged ending
— a final stab at the festering wound of womanhood, and the woman the narrator once was.