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1-Page Summary of Wild At Heart

Overall Summary

Wild at Heart by Patricia Gaffney is a romance novel that takes place in the late 1800s. It follows a young woman who moves back to her childhood home and discovers a man living alone in the woods near her house. The two eventually fall in love with each other, but it’s difficult for them because of their differences.

Sydney Darrow’s husband died after a year of marriage. Although they loved each other, their relationship lacked passion. Now Sydney is returning to her family home in Michigan where she will live with her father, two brothers and an aunt.

When Sydney returns home, she falls back into her old habits of trying to please her family and looking for approval from her father. He was always more interested in his scientific experiments than he was with his children. Her aunt Estelle took over the household after Sydney’s mother died.

Dr. Winter is a talented scientist who has just discovered something about human nature. He, his assistant Charles, and Sydney’s older brother Philip have found a young man who was lost in the woods before he was ten years old and spent two decades living with wolves in Canada. The young man can’t speak and seems feral so Dr. Winter thinks that he’s the perfect test case for his theories about altruism because it will be easy to see if this behavior is learned or intrinsic to humans.

Sydney is shocked to find that her father has been keeping a man imprisoned in their basement. She thinks it’s cruel, but they explain that he’s there for scientific reasons. However, when she meets the prisoner and sees his intelligence shining through his eyes, she agrees to help them with their experiments about altruism because of how much she cares for him. As time goes by, they grow closer together as friends and eventually fall in love with each other. He reveals that he can read because before he was lost at sea, he learned how to do so.

A man named Michael MacNeil has been around animals and books about etiquette for the past twenty years. Although he is intelligent, he does not understand how to behave with other people very well. He thinks that if you are nice to others, they will be nice back to you.

Since Michael can talk, he is no longer of any use to Dr. Winter. Sydney convinces her father to let him live in the family house until they find his family. Although Michael eagerly soaks up information and reads books, he still misses his family and goes on a trip with Sydney’s little brother Sam who treats him like another older brother. The two go to Chicago for the World Fair where they meet many interesting people along the way.

Michael is still a young man, and he’s strong and handsome. He knows that like the wolves who raised him, he’d like to mate for life. He also immediately becomes interested in Sydney when they meet. Sydney feels the same way toward Michael but has to fend off another man’s unwanted attentions. In one instance, her family maid flirts with Michael aggressively until it becomes obvious she wants something more than friendship from him—a revelation that surprises him because of his innocence about human sexuality. In another event, Sydney’s brother takes Michael to a brothel where he thinks there will be “fun.” However, when the prostitute explains what they are really going there for, Michael runs away because he understands instinctively that sex is not the same as making love

The family decides to take Michael to a zoo, thinking that this might help him remember the forest. However, as they read about how animals were treated in zoos in the late 1800s, we can’t help but feel bad for Michael when he freaks out and releases all of the zoo’s animals. Sydney protects him from police who are trying to find him.