From Strange History Comes Strong Fiction

THE WOMAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO RABBITS

Stories

By Emma Donoghue

Harcourt

256 pages, $24

It’s often said that fact is stranger than fiction. Emma Donoghue, an Irish writer who specializes in spinning intriguing tales from bits of historical facts, has staked her career on that premise. Her novel of last year, “Slammerkin,” set in working-class London of the 1700s, was inspired by a long-forgotten murder involving a young woman whose lust for a shiny red ribbon led to a life of prostitution. The facts on which that book was based, however, almost pale against the quirky lore fueling her newest release.

“The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits” is a series of historically based short stories focused on bizarre happenings to which Donoghue brings her intellectual curiosity and sharp writing, creating a hybrid of history, folklore and literature.

In “The Last Rabbit,” for example, we’re given what can only be described as stranger than strange. Mary Toft of Surrey, England, in the early 1700s managed to convince a medley of doctors that she’d given birth to dead rabbits. Unlike midwives of that age, doctors did not oversee childbirth and generally had scant understanding of the female reproductive system. According to Donoghue’s fictional perspective, Toft created the hoax as a response to poverty, confident she’d be paid by both the men of science and the curious to learn more about her tale.

The story is a bit gruesome in its details of staged “miracle” rabbit births, but Donoghue does a commanding job creating, if not a historically accurate figure of Toft, a convincing fictional portrait. “I tried to remember if childbirth itself was as bad as this mockery of it,” Toft wonders after performing her trick for yet another doctor. “With my last boy I was three days in labour, but at least I knew there was a real child to bring forth, not like this hollowness, this straining over nothing.”

“Night Vision” tells the childhood story of Frances Brown, the “Blind Poetess of Donegal,” and her desire to attend school. Donoghue demonstrates here and throughout the collection her ability to create arresting portraits of moments through sense details. Franny, the blind narrator, explains how she encounters her world. “I think colour is when you can taste something with your eyes,” she speculates. Her siblings, though, are unable to function in darkness. “They depend on the light so much that once the candle is snuffed out, the greasy air seems to extinguish them too.”

Donoghue’s narratives weave the best of Irish oral storytelling with the concrete of history, creating in these bizarre tales a look into lives less than typical. There’s “A Short Story,” based on “The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness,” and “Acts of Union,” about a man tricked into marriage under the effect of alcohol. (Donoghue also provides a concise after-note to each story explaining which aspects are factual and where she came across the source material.)

“Looking for Petronilla,” one of the book’s strongest entries, is narrated by the witch Dame Alice, who’s been living since the 12th century and has grown weary of existence. “The daily miracle, the return to the same healthy flesh. How long must it go on?” she laments. Though jaded with life, Alice has never attempted suicide. “I am afraid to discover that it would not work.” The story is an absorbing juxtaposition of current and past as Dame Alice returns to Kilkenny in the present day on her first trip back to Ireland since fleeing in 1324. She’s come to remember her loyal servant, Petronilla, who was burned at the stake for her blind allegiance to Alice. “History always becomes a cartoon, where it survives at all,” Dame Alice thinks upon seeing her own legend exploited. “Your best hope for a ride towards posterity is the bandwagon of folklore.”

The idea that folk tales and works of the imagination impress us with history in ways facts cannot drives Donoghue’s strongest stories and is solidified by her ability to write authentic characters. In her capable hands, they transcend their freak-show attributes to become credible individuals at the crossroads of time.

Not all the stories succeed. Some fail from lack of imagination, degenerating into polemical outbursts. “The Fox on the Line,” for example, shows the complex relationship of two women working for animal rights, but ultimately the story is overshadowed by the politics at the heart of their activities. “Revelations,” the story of a 40-day, end-of-the-world fast is much too transparent in its disdain of religious conviction. Donoghue’s reproach of fanaticism in this story eclipses the authenticity of her characters.

As a collection, though, the strong outweigh the weak, cementing the notion that the lies of fiction are often more authentic than hard facts. Or, as one of Donoghue’s characters puts it, lies “last longer than the truth, as fruit is better preserved in wine than water.”