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
There Was an Old Woman Who Lived Under a Hill which is the very Essence of Truth. 'She lived under the hill, and if she is not gone she lives there still', Nobody will presume to contradict this." The 1810 edition of "Gammer Gurton's Garland" included a variant Edgar, in Shakespeare's "King Lear", appears to refer to this version when he says "Pillycock sat on Pillycock hill," which indicates that the rhyme was known as early as the first decade of the seventeenth century. The final lines first appeared in print c. 1843. There Was an Old Woman Who Lived Under a Hill "There was an old woman lived under