The young man doesn’t speak and seems to be feral, so he is the perfect test case for Dr. Winter is a gifted anthropologist who has just made a startling discovery: he, his assistant Charles, and Sydney’s older brother, Philip, have discovered and captured “Ontario Man,” a young man who was lost in the woods before he was ten years old and has spent two decades living on his own among wolves in the Canadian wilderness. She is also stymied by her stern aunt Estelle, her father’s sister, who became the woman of the house after the death of Sydney’s mother.ĭr. Harley Winter, who always had more time for his scientific experiments than for his children. When Sydney returns, she falls back into her old pattern of trying to please her family and looking for the approval of her father, Dr. As the novel opens on the year 1893, Sydney returns to her family home in Michigan, where she will live with her father, two brothers, and an aunt. Although their relationship was loving, and he was a kind man, their life lacked the kind of passion that Sydney has sometimes dreamed about.

Sydney Darrow’s husband died eighteen months ago after a year of marriage. In the course of rediscovering the humanity of a man who grew up surrounded by animals, the young woman finds herself unable to resist his honest and guileless charms. The novel follows the relationship that blooms between a young widow who has returned to her childhood home and a man discovered living in the woods by her father, a prominent anthropologist.

Published in 1997, the romance novel Wild at Heart by Patricia Gaffney takes as its premise the concept of a man raised alone in the wilderness – think Tarzan or Mowgli – and transports it to end of the nineteenth-century Midwest.

Wild at heart book guote