BOOK REVIEW: THE HOUNDING By Xenobe Purvis (Hutchinson Heinemann 2025)
Xenobe Purvis's debut novel The Hounding is set in the eighteenth century in the village of Little Nettlebed, Oxfordshire. It's the story of the five Mansfield sisters over the course of a hot, uncomfortable summer. Fictional accounts of sisters are an appealing choice for authors and readers alike, I'm thinking of Jane Austen's sisters navigating society in Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, or Jnichiro Tanizaki’s famous Makioka Sisters of Japan. Purvis takes this sisterhood a step beyond the comfortable society circles of Victorian fiction. The Mansfield sisters in The Hounding are orphaned and strange and seen as odd by their fellow villagers. It's a novel that brings to mind the strangeness of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" or the unsettling chambers and castles of Angela Carter.
‘The Season of strangeness had begun.’
It's a smouldering, sickly summer, and Purvis is brilliant at setting the atmosphere throughout the book. It’s putrid, festering, sweltering. "The afternoon light cast the riverside in dreamlike colours, jaundicing the saucers of white flowers on the nearby elder, dipping the willow in gold." The village and its inhabitants wither in the heat, caught static and motionless in a strange, unreal air, as though as Purvis writes, "the season of strangeness had begun." In this ungodly weather, the sisters try to rescue a large sturgeon beached on the banks of the Thames. Instead of being seen as charitable, they are maligned as strange, because they don't feast on it as the rest of the villagers hope to do. Worse, a rumour is begun by the mostly drunk ferryman, Peter Darling, out of work because the water is so low, and slighted by the sisters' abrupt independence and his own raw male ego. He claims they don't just transform their surroundings but transform themselves into hounds and swears he has seen them do it in the evenings. Word spreads, imaginations flare, and soon the whole village seems to believe him.
‘The great, gruelling trials of being a woman in a world governed by men.’
Purvis is a literary researcher when she isn't writing novels, and she discovered a hint of this scandal while combing through old tomes; the story took off from there. The apt title refers not only to the sisters' supposed ability to transform into dogs, but to the literal hounding of women by villagers spurred on by rumour. Purvis engages with the age-old notion that women and femininity can be unnerving, even a menace, and so women are often perceived as dangerous, witchlike, possessed of dark forces out to do no good. this is especially true if women are seen to be unconventional, non confirmative and unfettered by male figures.
That discomfort runs through the novel's very texture. The Hounding is written with a deep, lush, simmering sense of foreboding, one that mirrors both the sisters' unease with their own femininity and the villagers' unease with them. When one of the sisters, Hester, gets her period, she is so disgusted and disturbed that she takes to climbing trees, sobbing, wishing she were ‘dull as a pebble.’Her sister Anne says, "pebbles look very peaceful and are unencumbered by anything like blood and breasts." The changing female body becomes something more than uncomfortable, a fearful, beastlike thing, a predator out to do no good. This is the societal spectre the sisters are hounded into.There's a particularly morbid scene in which six pregnant women are forced to carry the coffin of a woman who has just died in childbirth, as a warning of what may await them. It's a scene that lays bare the weight of what men force women to carry, in every sense. Temperance, the pub owner's wife, sums it up as the "great gruelling trials of being a woman in a world governed by men."
Purvis's prose is spare but powerful, deep and haunting. The novel drips with sweat, foreboding, and unease, and despite its brevity it is layered and thought-provoking. The ending is left open, so the reader must decide whether they themselves are party to the rumour. Purvis makes us complicit in the rumour-making, asking whether we really do, or don't, believe in the hounding.
THE HOUNDING By Xenobe Purvis (Hutchinson Heinemann, 2025)