From Book News
From ballads, epitaphs, paintings, tombstones, and diary fragments, Donoghue (Slammerkin) has fashioned a collection of historical tales about what might have happened to women who have piqued her curiosity and fired her imagination. In the title story, after a pregnant woman stuns her husband by pretending to give birth to the rabbit she was preparing for dinner, she is persuaded to take the charade further, go on tour, and see whether she can dupe the public into coming to view her "offspring." Some of these tales feature acts of breathtaking cruelty: in "Revelations," a religious cult leader convinces her followers to fast for 40 days in order to welcome their new messiah properly; and in "Cured," a Victorian gynecologist with a perverse sense of morality performs corrective surgery on his unsuspecting patients. Many of these stories deal with women who nurture deep (and sometimes unspoken) passion for other women, as in "How a Lady Dies," in which a close friend of Frances Sheridan, the noted playwright's wife, allows herself to succumb to illness and death rather than face a life without her true love. Each portrait is so strikingly original and so utterly convincing that readers will be hard pressed to believe the story could have happened any other way. Enthusiastically recommended. Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Book Description
Published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2002, 0-15-100937-6
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover
"An inspired dance on the narrow and exhilarating cliff-edge of art."
-THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
EM M A D O N O G H U E, celebrated author of Slammerkin, vividly
animates hidden scraps of the past in this remarkable collection. An
engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits, a plague ballad, theological
pamphlets, and an articulated skeleton are ingeniously fleshed out
into rollicking tales. Whether she's spinning the tale of a soldier tricked
into marrying a dowdy spinster, or a Victorian surgeon's attempts to
"improve" women, Donoghue fills us with the sights and smells of the
period as she summons the ghosts of ordinary people, bringing them to
unforgettable life in fiction.
"Sprightly prose. Transcends the usual limitations of historical fiction."
-THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Remarkably vivid, inventive scenes give life to each story
and make the collection absorbing." -THE VILLAGE VOICE
"Earthy, exhilarating tales." -ELLE
A SELECTION OF THE BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB
AND THE QUALITY PAPERBACK BOOK CLUB
EMMA DONOGHUE, born in 1969, is an Irish novelist,
playwright, and historian who lives in Canada. Her novel
Slammerkin was named a notable book of the year by the New
York Times and the Washington Post.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Library Journal
From ballads, epitaphs, paintings, tombstones, and diary fragments, Donoghue (Slammerkin) has fashioned a collection of historical tales about what might have happened to women who have piqued her curiosity and fired her imagination. In the title story, after a pregnant woman stuns her husband by pretending to give birth to the rabbit she was preparing for dinner, she is persuaded to take the charade further, go on tour, and see whether she can dupe the public into coming to view her "offspring." Some of these tales feature acts of breathtaking cruelty: in "Revelations," a religious cult leader convinces her followers to fast for 40 days in order to welcome their new messiah properly; and in "Cured," a Victorian gynecologist with a perverse sense of morality performs corrective surgery on his unsuspecting patients. Many of these stories deal with women who nurture deep (and sometimes unspoken) passion for other women, as in "How a Lady Dies," in which a close friend of Frances Sheridan, the noted playwright's wife, allows herself to succumb to illness and death rather than face a life without her true love. Each portrait is so strikingly original and so utterly convincing that readers will be hard pressed to believe the story could have happened any other way. Enthusiastically recommended. Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Engaging in a kind of literary grave robbing--some 10 years of gleaning "history scraps" from 700 years of British and Irish life--Donoghue has appropriated surgical case notes, an engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits, old theological pamphlets, and more known "facts" to use as the cores of the 17 stories in this book: fictions that are true, though not, perhaps, in their most sensational particulars. They include such causes celebres as the story of Mary Toft, who in 1726 conned half of England into believing she had given birth to rabbits, and the wedding night of Euphemia "Effie" Chalmers Gray (1828-97) and art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) in a six-year marriage that ended when Effie ran away and had the marriage annulled on the grounds of nonconsummation. The latter, based on family letters and legal documents cited in various Ruskin biographies, tends, as do the rest of these odd accounts, to favor the woman in the affair. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review
PRAISE FOR THE WOMAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO RABBITS
"An inspired dance on the narrow and exhilarating cliff-edge of art."--The Washington Post
"Through [Donoghue's] colorful detail we see, hear and smell the poignant episodes in these complex, but ordinary, lives."--USA Today
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From the Forword to THE WOMAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO RABBITS:This is a book of fictions, but they are also true. The title [of one of the stories], Histories of Nothing, comes from Charlotte Lennox's novel The Female Quixote (1752). Lennox's heroine, the Lady Arabella, sees high drama everywhere. She wakes up after a brief swoon, for instance, and interrogates her maid Lucy about all the adventures that must have befallen her while she was unconscious: "Well, said Arabella, and why dost though not satisfy my Curiosity? Is it not fit I should be acquainted with such a momentous Part of my History? I can't, indeed, and please your Ladyship, said Lucy. What, can'st thou not, said Arabella, enrag'd at her Stupidity. Why, Madam, said Lucy sobbing, I can't make a History of nothing."Poor Arabella remains convinced that the witness is stupid or lying, but the fact is that nothing ever really happens to her outside the lost 'History' of her dreams. What makes her such a memorable character is her frustration, her tantalizing sense that her story is just out of reach, her rage to remember. In this book I am trying to make 'histories of nothing,' or practically nothing. My sources are just a few scraps of the cultural detritus of the British Isles over the last seven hundred years: an engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits; a plague ballad; surgical case-notes; theological pamphlets; an articulated skeleton. Single lines of recorded speech caught like hairs on the skirts of time. I want to resurrect and give fictional life to episodes that are so lacking in hard evidence, so apparently trivial and unrepresentative, or so downright peculiar, that history (in the traditional sense) has turned a blind eye. Stories which (unlike Lady Arabella's adventures) really did happen, but which have been lost, forgotten, or written off as the little petty 'nothings' of private life. I call them histories but they are, of course, fictions; I trust in the paradox that the techniques of historical research can give fiction a backbone, and that fiction can touch the parts historical accounts can't reach. The 'History' I was taught at school in Dublin was mostly a matter of famous dates and important men, parliaments and battlefields. But over the years I have come to the conclusion that the true story of each era must include not just its 'average peasant' or 'typical citizen,' but its eccentrics and its deviants. In Histories of Nothing, kings, surgeons, soldiers and ladies of leisure rub shoulders with cross-dressers, cult leaders, poisoners and arsonists. I want to summon the ghosts of those who counted for nothing in their day, who were written off as mere children, cripples, half-breeds, freaks and nobodies. In my head, all these people seem to clamour for their moment in the spotlight, frantic for the 'momentous Part of their History' (as Arabella would put it) to be set down. So here is a book of stories about what happened, and how it might have happened, in various obscure corners of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, at various moments over the past seven centuries. These are only a handful of all the possible stories that could be told, of course; for one reason or another, these are the ones that haunt me. 'Try to remember, or failing that, invent,' Monique Wittig urges in her early feminist novel Les Guerilleres (1969). Writing this book, I have used both rigorous research and wild guesswork. I have come to realize that fictional invention does not have to be a mark of the 'failure' of historical remembering; that memory and invention are two hands engaged in the same muddy work of resurrecting.Previously published stories: 1. 'Words for Things,' The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories (1993); 2. 'How a Lady Dies,' Hers 3 (2000); 3. 'The Fox on the Line,' Circa 2000 (2000); 4. 'Looking for Petronilla' The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction (2000).'Figures of Speech,' 'The Last Rabbit,' and 'Night Vision,' were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 2000. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Emma Donoghue, born in 1969, is an Irish novelist, playwright, and historian who lives in Canada. Her novel Slammerkin was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
![The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits: Stories (Harvest Book) by [Emma Donoghue]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51rs4BWpc9L._SY346_.jpg)
