A writer choosing their subject shows the world what they care about, what they obsess about, what keeps them up at night and away from the rest of their lives. Given the intense vulnerability of that decision, writers often keep their reasons under wraps. In Karolina Romqvist’s Bear Woman, this is not the case: this tale is about explicit fascination.

A Swedish writer — perhaps Romqvist’s alter ego — hears the story of Marguerite de la Rocque, a sixteenth-century French noblewoman who embarks with her guardian on an expedition to New France. Along the way, she becomes involved in a scandal and is marooned, as punishment, on an uninhabited island in Newfoundland. Moved by the plight of the bearskin-clad woman who unwillingly becomes the first white settler of the so-called “New World,” the writer is drawn to telling her story without fully understanding why. “I’m simply afraid,” she admits. “It’s like witnessing a stubborn storm rumbling in, the violent power of story crushing everything in its path and dragging it along.”

In this genre-defying work that combines fiction, investigation, and essay, Romqvist seems most at ease when playing with formal constraints. Translated by Saskia Vogel in a sparse and transparent prose, the story is told by a narrator whom the reader eagerly follows down the rabbit hole of the writing process, as she digs through archives in search of maps of the island and other historical documents, goes on a research trip to Paris and environs, and reads fellow chroniclers’ stories of Marguerite de la Rocque’s survival against the elements.

Throughout, the book steers clear of the romanticism that surrounds depictions of creative life. The narrator is not shy about showing the writing trade’s darker: insecurity, procrastination, straying from the subject, writer’s block, self-doubt.

Writing is accompanied by a constant sense of shame and guilt, in writing instead of working with something that could be of use to others, in living for writing instead of togetherness, in transforming other people’s lives, taking all this reality and turning it into words, forcing it onto paper because … Yes, why?

Most pressing is the issue of legitimacy. Is this writer truly the right person to tell this story? She looks to soothe this worry interpreting what she sees as signs; as they appear, they bring her back to the writing, as if she needs to believe that she’s meant to write this story. As if choosing to write, if one has the option not to, is madness.

Slowly the narrator overcomes her initial frustration, brought on by the impossibility of knowing all the facts. As she becomes more comfortable with uncertainty, she writes more freely into the space that opens up. As the writer allows the novel to perforate reality,

we see in vivid detail what life on the island might have looked like: how Marguerite fought off polar bears and wolverines and illness, how she harvested berries and survived the cold, how she endures her pregnancy and gives birth.

What starts as an exploration of the wilderness quickly turns into an internal expedition. The literary detective work leads the writer sitting at her desk in Stockholm more deeply into Marguerite’s world. Parallels emerge. The writer’s fears about motherhood are reflected in Marguerite’s pregnancy, her experience of childbirth, and the mourning of her dead newborn. The unjust treatment of the women of the time makes the writer wonder how to parent her teenage daughter. The isolation on the island mirrors the quiet of the writing life.

The writer admires Marguerite for being an indomitable woman with a strength she doesn’t see in herself, and which she argues derives from the harshness of a time when women’s fates were at the entire mercy of men. What does it take to be a woman in modernity? She might not need Marguerite’s arquebus-shooting skills to fend off the beasts, yet she is punched in the face by a stranger on the street. The blistering misogyny and consequent violence may have morphed over centuries, but they have certainly not disappeared.

The writer hides behind her pages and, from that redoubt, recaptures a measure of control: “[Writing] had also been a way to not have to be a woman: to look, instead of being looked at.” But this power is double-edged. Among other things, The Bear Woman is a reflection on the power at once wielded and yielded by storytellers. “Maybe I hadn’t yet understood what writing is,” the narrator reflects, “that it, like all narration, implies a forceful takeover. And whoever I was and however I felt, I was still a writer, describing other people and the world, thereby owning them in the way that language and stories had always owned me.”

Particularly with regard to stories about women, violence can very well be done by omission. The original sex scandal is never more than suggested, and we never learn anything about it except that it was scandalous. Certain figures are excluded from the telling — the maidservant isn’t mentioned in some accounts, nor are the female convicts brought on board “for the crew,” nor are the Indigenous people who inhabited those parts. Omissions also creep into how stories are told, in what light. Even Queen Marguerite of Navarre, who recounted the story of her namesake in her Héptameron, is remembered only as an “amateur” when, in fact, she was among the most important figures of the Renaissance. Painfully aware of the shortcomings of the narrative decisions made by her predecessors, Romqvist attempts to recenter Marguerite’s story from the margins while taking care not to slant the portrayal by imposing her own beliefs. It is important that Marguerite’s story be known, and also that it be right.

Romqvist — and/or her alter ego — must not fear, for her initial obsession has turned into a beautiful book, reflective, nuanced, deep, sharp. She breaks the cycle of violence by telling the story, and in doing so, she does justice to Marguerite de la Rocque.

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