Alas, that frisson of horror is short-lived. No sooner do we meet this psychotic killer than he gets struck down by Powhatan Indians. One is almost sorry to see him go.

But the servant girl keeps running.

“I want to live, the girl said. If I stop I will die.”

And yet, I thought, if you don’t, I will.

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The itinerant story is a challenge of pacing, literally and literarily. From Homer’s “The Odyssey” to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” such tales have always been a matter of one damn thing after another. And novels like “The Outlander,” by Gil Adamson, and “Once Upon a River,” by Bonnie Jo Campbell, demonstrate how gripping the plight of an imperiled young woman setting off alone through nature can be.

This is, of course, not Groff’s first errand into the wilderness. Her previous novel, an unlikely bestseller called “Matrix,” sprang from medieval history: the founding of a nunnery in 12th-century England. Groff imagined the poet Marie de France as a teenager forced to venture into the dark woods to serve as the abbess.

In Groff’s hands, the tale of a medieval nunnery is must-read fiction

With her new novel, Groff has made that trek more challenging for author and reader.

“The Vaster Wilds” draws us back to the doomed Jamestown, Va., settlement at the start of the 17th century. Our heroine, a young servant girl, has slipped out of the fort where her English companions are starving, freezing and suffering from smallpox — or already dead. “She had chosen to flee,” Groff writes, “and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known.”

“Think not of it, girl, she told herself, think not of it, else you shall die of grief.”

For the most part, she takes her own advice and does not think of it, which means that for long stretches we’re left grubbing for nits about what sparked her flight and why the expiring settlers would bother trying to track her down. The clues are tantalizing, but they gather as slowly as moss on a tree. And the answer, when it does finally come, delivers little of the seismic shock generated by the revelations in Groff’s masterpiece, “Fates and Furies.”

‘Fates and Furies’: A masterful tale of marriage and secrets

We do learn, though, that the girl was purchased from a poorhouse in England to replace a wealthy woman’s pet monkey; she even got the dead monkey’s name, Zed. (Others call her Lamentations, which is hardly more encouraging.) For a time, the girl’s only duty in the grand English house was to serve as a kind of human foot warmer, but when her mistress gave birth to a profoundly mentally disabled daughter, Zed became the baby’s devoted nursemaid.

That relatively pleasant life dissolved when her mistress’s new husband — a wicked minister — insisted they move to the New World. What they found there could not be more different from the land of milk and honey they anticipated. When their storm-wrecked ships sailed up the James River, the newcomers were met by a gang of living skeletons, survivors from the last group that made the voyage. Seeing the smoldering fort on the bank, Zed’s mistress muttered, “We have made a terrible mistake.”

In every one of these glimpses of Zed’s life back in England or at the Jamestown settlement, the novel vibrates with tension and drama that unveil the fabric of early-17th-century life. But such treats are parceled out to us as rarely as she discovers a handful of fresh mushrooms or a scurry of “squirming pink baby squirrels.” Instead, the vast part of “The Vaster Wilds” remains focused on the girl tromping inexorably through the timeless forest.

She struggles to stay warm.

There is constant movement but little momentum, as though the girl were on a woodland treadmill. Our compensation for this stasis is Groff’s lush prose, which works hard to inspire awe with its Thoreauvian attention to the natural world:

“At the top of a rise, she came into a clearing and saw in her astonishment a tangle of blackberry bushes so thick and so tall that even the smallest and nimblest of birds and the thickest-pelted bears could not have stripped the winter-dried berries away no matter how fully they ate. The beasts and birds had touched only the external berries and there were plenty of dried berries still remaining within the bushes. If she inserted her arms carefully into the thorny tangles and cut with the knife until her body could pass within the opening, she could reach the dried berries and pluck them into her sack. But first she filled her mouth, and tears came into her eyes with the sharpness of the berries, then the sweet.”

Such gorgeous passages in “The Vaster Wilds” are frequently entrancing, but they can also evoke painting on velvet. Once detected, the performative aroma of this style is hard to shake. For instance, as the girl sails for the New World, Groff writes: “When the wind was fine, she stayed perched out of the way of the sailors working and stared at the blue immensity and felt a deep wonder surging in her. In the night, she loved to watch the wide track of the moon upon the pleated water and the strange creatures she saw or imagined that surfaced to stare upon the passing boat.”

For better or worse, it’s that swelling sense of awe that represents the most significant development in “The Vaster Wilds.” Through the opening sections, the fleeing girl sounds well-versed in the tropes and doctrines of early-17th-century Christianity; her thoughts are flecked with images from the Bible and allusions to the stories of Job and Jacob. But as her journey progresses, she ascends toward a kind of mysticism:

“She sensed the earth under her in its spin and knew herself to be a piece of it, necessary and large enough,” Groff writes. “For a long moment, she saw herself lying in the very center of the palm of god’s hand, and the night was made of god’s fingers curved to protect her against the blaze of eternity. And the stars and the moon were the space shining within. And the air felt good upon her head.”

And near the end, she’s reveling in her gnostic wisdom:

“Perhaps, she thought, god was neither trinity nor singular but multiple, as various as the many living things that did live upon the earth.

“Perhaps god already lived within all.

“And this place and these people here did not need the english to bring god to them.”

I want to be swept away by this beautiful and profound metaphysical insight, but how is it that we’ve traveled back in time 400 years only to find a young woman ready to graduate from Reed College with a double major in ecofeminism and Native studies?

Indeed, what’s presented here as radical, even heretical for this brave, long-suffering girl is blandly acceptable to contemporary readers of literary fiction. There is, in the end, nothing essentially removed about Zed. She runs and runs and runs untold miles, yet she ultimately arrives at a place wholly comfortable to us.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.