The Wood Wife

1996 novel by Terri Windling

The Wood Wife is a novel by American writer Terri Windling, published by Tor Books in 1996. It won the Mythopoeic Award for Novel of the Year. It is Windling's first novel; she is better known as a longtime editor of fantasy and speculative fiction. Though Cooper and Naverra are dead before the action of the book takes place, the chapters end with excerpts from their letters to each other, bringing them into the narrative. Many years prior, she had approached Cooper about writing his biography, and he declined. Now, as she takes up residence at his former home in the mountains of the Desert Southwest, she regards her inheritance as tacit permission to pursue that biography. Maggie is forty years old, moving to the desert and leaving Los Angeles and her ex husband behind her, Maggie becomes friends with some of the locals. Slowly, she begins to see and develop relationships with apparently mythical, impossible creatures residing in the area, including six guardians of earth, sky, and the four cardinal directions

Author Charles DeLint (a fellow member of Terri Windling's Endicott Studio project) praised the novel as "gorgeous, lyric in places, spare in others, always just right. The characters are distinct, the relationships between them revealing and truthful." exhibited by the relationships in the novel. Jo Walton writes about several themes regarding creativity and place in the novel. She writes of it as a "rural fantasy" and a "regional American fantasy" with particular attention to both the mythological context of people indigenous to the southwest and the mythologies brought by European settlers, including Davis Cooper. Cooper and Naverra represent an earlier generation of poets and artists inspired by the locality of the book, while Maggie and Juan del Rio (a painter among Maggie's new friends) are a new generation. All four reflect their relationship with the land and its spirits in their art. Walton also highlights the theme of romantic partners who each have their own creative pursuits, and the different ways of supporting a partner's artistic efforts. Walton and DeLint both note that Windling is best known as an editor and anthologist of contemporary, mythic fantasy rather than an author. Both noted her editorial acumen, and praise her writing in that context. Echoing DeLint's description of the writing as "always just right," Walton writes that the novel "hits a sweet spot for me where I just love everything it's doing."