Back Results list  
 
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
Jacket image for The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
View larger image
Author(s): Emma Donoghue  
ISBN: 1860499546
ISBN-13: 9781860499548
Publication Date: 06 Jun 2002
Pages: 222 (198 x 129)
Format: Paperback
Published Price: £7.99


Add to basket »
Email a friend Email a friend
Print this page Print this Page
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?'

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:

Emma Donoghue is an Irish writer who has published twelve books of fiction, drama and literary history. Born in Dublin in 1969, she grew up in Ireland before spending eight years in Cambridge doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature. She moved to London, Ontario, in Canada, in 1998, and lives there with her partner and child.

Her fiction includes two novels set in contemporary Ireland, Stir-Fry

Site by ehaus