In dedicating The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits to her father, Emma Donoghue writes "that books are for letting us imagine lives other than our own". In the preface to her 1998 biography of the Victorian aunt-niece authorial partnership behind the pen name Michael Field, Donoghue states one of her chief concerns to be "how to make history come alive on the page". Yvonne Nolan assesses how well she has achieved this.
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, a collection of short stories based on real historical events and characters, is a fitting follow-up and and a more varied exposition of the talents she brought to bear on the writing of her novel Slammerkin (Virago, 2000) which imagined the life of Mary Saunders, an 18th- century maid sentenced to death in 1764 for murdering her mistress, Jane Jones.
Though the title might suggest that Donoghue's stories dwell on a series of historical freaks or oddities; and the back cover does nothing to disabuse the reader of this impression, Donoghue is more than a Jerry Springer-like midwife to 18th- and 19th-century grotesqueries. The woman who gave birth to rabbits was one Mary Toft, who in the 1720s tried to hoax her way into some money by pretending to give birth to rabbits. She has much in common with some of Donoghue's other subjects: the tiny Cork woman Kitty Crackham (she was one foot, eight inches tall) who, in the 1820s, was toured as a freak; Miss F, who in 1861 endures a clitoridectomy as a cure for an injured back; the servant Petronilla de Meath, burnt alive in Kilkenny in 1324 for the sins of her murderous mistress.
The extraordinariness of what happened to these women naturally attracts Donoghue's writerly attention but she is much more interested in what it was like to live inside their heads. Donoghue's characters are driven by desperation and, often, grim determination in face of insuperable odds. They are non-people, either powerless or moneyless or both. Their opinions and thoughts count as nothing, even their bodies are not their own because they belong to what used to be the lowest caste of human creature, woman.
Historians are very suspicious of acts of the imagination and even moderate speculation must be backed with creditable primary sources. But there are vast areas of time which orthodox historical analysis cannot examine, such as the tiny match light of a forgotten woman's life as against the diaried, biographied, well-illumined lives of even quite humble men in the same period.
Emma Donoghue is eruditely familiar with the 18th century in particular, and her informed imaginings combined with her sheer cleverness and elegance as a writer breathe vivid life into real characters who heretofore resided in the footnotes of history (if even that). For this alone she should be saluted, but for this reader at least, it is in the quiet stories of this volume that Donoghue is at her descriptive, empathetic best: the blind Irish writer Frances Brown in childhood imagines what birds feel like according to their song, "The clinking blackbird would feel like the back of a spoon, but the wood pigeon must be soft as the underbelly of a rabbit"; the Widow Starre remembers the death of her baby "And in the morning he was cool on her belly, chilly as a small bag of barley"; the tubercular Elizabeth Pennington is so ill and despairing that her "mouth will only open the width of a finger, and the beef smells of blood. She has the impression that wine drains through her as the rain through peat; that food is too slippery to glue itself to her bones".
The fictions of The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits are deceptively short but they are rich in detail and reward a slow, attentive reading. They are a triumph of imagining the past into life and mark a time when fate, malign or benign, not volition, shaped the lives of women.
Yvonne Nolan is a critic and journalist
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. By Emma Donoghue. Virago, 212 pp. £7.99 sterling