Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [0]
Emma Donoghue
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
...
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
The Last Rabbit
Acts of Union
The Fox on the Line
Account
Revelations
Night Vision
Ballad
Come, Gentle Night
Salvage
Cured
Figures of Speech
Words for Things
How a Lady Dies
A Short Story
Dido
The Necessity of Burning
Looking for Petronilla
A Harvest Book • Harcourt, Inc.
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Copyright © 2002 by Emma Donoghue
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Donoghue, Emma, 1969–
The woman who gave birth to rabbits: stories/
Emma Donoghue.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-15-602739-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-602739-7
I. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction.
2. Curiosities and wonders—Fiction.
3. Historical fiction, English. 4. Women—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6054.0547 W66 2002
823'.914—dc21 2002000466
Text set in Cochin
Display set in Powhatten
Designed by Cathy Riggs
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvest edition 2003
A C E G I K J H F D B
This book is dedicated with love to my father, Denis,
who taught me that books are for letting us
imagine lives other than our own.
Contents
Preface • [>]
Acknowledgments • [>]
The Last Rabbit • [>]
Acts of Union • [>]
The Fox on the Line • [>]
Account • [>]
Revelations • [>]
Night Vision • [>]
Ballad • [>]
Come, Gentle Night • [>]
Salvage • [>]
Cured • [>]
Figures of Speech • [>]
Words for Things • [>]
How a Lady Dies • [>]
A Short Story • [>]
Dido • [>]
The Necessity of Burning • [>]
Looking for Petronilla • [>]
Preface
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 these characters 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 of 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?" In her novel Les Guérillères (1969), published the year I was born, Monique Wittig urges: "Try to remember, or, failing that, invent." I have tried to use memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past.
Acknowledgments
"A Short Story," "Figures of Speech," and "Night Vision" were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 2000. "Words for Things" was first published in The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Storied (1993), "How a Lady Dies" in Herd 3 (2000), "The Fox on the Line" in Circa 2000 (2000), and "Looking for Petronilla" in The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction (2000). "A Short Story" was included in a limited-edition calendar by Language in Dublin (2001), and "Figures of Speech" was first published in The Lady (2001).
I am grateful to Peggy Reynolds for being the first to suggest I should write a historical short story, and also to Eddi Reader, because I conceived this book all at once during an inspiring concert