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: #162819 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 222 pages

Review
Inspired by the myriad little snippets of history that she came across in the last decade or so, Emma Donoghue felt compelled to pen these tales about the 'flotsam and jetsam of the last seven hundred years'. Tantalizingly described as a 'book of fictions that are also true', this collection stops off frequently at unexpected junctures to consider peculiar past moments in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The title comes from the extraordinary story of Mary Toft, a woman from Godalming, who, with the conspiratorial help of a self-publicising ?man-midwife', succeeded in convincing 18th-century England that she could actually give birth to rabbits. Told in the first person, this evocative tale convincingly conveys the grave effects of a pregnant woman's practical joke. Next stop is County Mayo in the west of Ireland just after the introduction of the Act of Union, where a young English captain's embarrassing health problem leads to an encounter with an apothecary. A meal in a smoky parlour results in too much poteen being downed, and a drunken vow that causes him to rue the consequences of his rash behaviour. Other stories revolve around the horrendous experiments carried out on live animals that resulted in the passing of the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, the effects of religious fervour and divine visitations on the Buchanite Community in Scotland, and the Peasants' Revolt in 14th-century Cambridge. The one thing these short stories have in common is the beauty of the writing, and they're all capable of easily transporting the reader to their source. Each carefully crafted tale can be read independently, allowing for repeated visits to a vanished world to discover the fate of a woman accused of witchcraft or the sadness at the heart of the short and painful life of a tiny child. (Kirkus UK)

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.