The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits Review
Amazingly clever and beautifully written, I enjoyed this collection of short stories, starting with the insight into the life of Mary Toft, The [real] Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits. All the stories in this collection were inspired by interesting and eccentric anecdotes in the real history of the British Isles. Emma Donoghue is a true master.
For me personally, these stories were hit and miss. Some of them I found boring, such as “Ballad.” My favorites were “Dido,” and “Salvage.” “Dido” is about Dido Elizabeth Belle, a mixed-race girl living with her white family, the Lindsays, at Kenwood House in Hampstead. She travels to London and makes discoveries about the world outside her small privileged bubble. “Salvage” is about a disabled scholarly woman and her cousin directing a rescue mission of shipwreck off the Norfolk coast. Both of these stories are powerful and seek to foreground non-white and disabled people that popular history often erases.
Some stories are also humorous — for example, “Come, Gentle Night,” follows the wedding night of painter John Ruskin and Effie Gray in 1848. Their marriage was eventually annulled for non-consummation, and Effie Gray went on to marry another painter, John Everett Millais, with whom she had eight children.
