Near to the Wild Heart opens with a scene of the child Joana playing in the garden, making up poems for her father. Joana's wildness and barely suppressed violence, along with her linguistic creativity, are her most notable features. She is frequently compared to animals: over the course of the book Lispector compares her to a bird, a snake, a wildcat, a horse, and a dog. She commits transgressive acts—as a child she throws a book at an old man's head, for example, and as a married woman she leaves her husband, Otávio, and greets the news of his adultery—he has made another woman, his
When God Was a Woman When God Was a Woman When God Was a Woman is the U.S. title of a 1976 book by sculptor and art historian Merlin Stone. It was published earlier in the United Kingdom as The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women's Rites. It has been translated into French as "Quand Dieu était femme" (SCE-Services Complets d'Edition, Québec, Canada) in 1978, into Dutch as "Eens was God als Vrouw belichaamd – De onderdrukking van de riten van de vrouw" in 1979, into German as "Als Gott eine Frau war" in 1989 and into Italian as "Quando Dio era una donna" in