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The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
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| List Price: | £7.99 |
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Average customer review:
Product Description
'The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits is a book of fictions, but they are also true. Over the last ten years, I have often stumbled over a scrap of history so fascinating that I had to stop whatever I was doing and write a story about it. My sources are the flotsam and jetsam of the last seven hundred years of British and Irish life: surgical case-notes; trial records; a plague ballad; theological pamphlets; a painting of two girls in a garden; an articulated skeleton. Some of the ghosts in this collection have famous names; others were written off as cripples, children, half-breeds, freaks and nobodies. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits is named for Mary Toft, who in 1726 managed to convince half England that she had done just that. So this book is what I have to show for ten years of sporadic grave-robbing, ferreting out forgotten puzzles and peculiar incidents, asking 'What really happened?', but also, 'What if?'
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #275085 in Books
- Published on: 2002-06-06
- Original language: English
- Binding: Paperback
- 222 pages
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Emma Donoghue is an Irish novelist, playwright and historian. She lives in Canada.
Customer Reviews
Vignettes from diverse lives...
Emma Donoghue's gift, as showcased so brilliantly in Slammerkin, lies in bringing the long-dead to life; people about whom we know nothing apart from a few sentences which may or may not be apocryphal. In The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits, she presents us with brief glimpses into a selection of unusual lives and circumstances from history's footnotes.
Why would someone stage a delivery of dead rabbits, and (dear God) how would they do it? What about the people born with unusual physical conditions who were displayed as oddities? How did women who sought medical help for a variety of ills end up being put through clitoridectomy in the name of 'medicine'?
Fascinating, thought-provoking and sometimes agonisingly moving, this is an unusual and compelling anthology.
Great start...
The title story is excellent; well written, amusing, and utterly engaging but the shorts after that range from mildly interesting to fairly dull. I really wanted to enjoy this work as it had such promise to be interesting...it wasn't. I have given it 3 stars solely based on the title story. I think it should have been an interesting exercise on the author's part rather than be shared with the reading public.
