The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Emma Donoghue

Written by Emma Donoghue
Read by Jilly Bond, Caroline Lennon, Maggie Mash, Cathleen McCarron
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 48 Kbps
Unabridged

Emma Donoghue vividly brings to life stories inspired by her discoveries of fascinating, hidden scraps of the past. Here an engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits, a plague ballad, surgical case notes, theological pamphlets, and an articulated skeleton are ingeniously fleshed out into rollicking, full-bodied fictions.

Whether she’s spinning the tale of an English soldier tricked into marrying a dowdy spinster, a Victorian surgeon’s attempts to “improve” women, a seventeenth-century Irish countess who ran away to Italy disguised as a man, or an “undead” murderess returning for the maid she left behind to be executed in her place, Emma Donoghue brings to her tales a colorful, elegant prose filled with the sights and smells and sounds of the period. She summons the ghosts of those men and women who counted for nothing in their own day and brings them to unforgettable life in fiction.

Descriptions from Emma Donoghue’s website:

‘Acts of Union’ - in Mayo in the early 1800s, an army officer is tricked into a fraudulent marriage.

‘Account’ - an experimental story in a list format, about a king’s mistress who died mysteriously in 1490s Scotland.

‘Ballad’ - inspired by the old folk song of Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, this is about war, plague and a love triangle in Methven, Scotland in 1645.

‘Come, Gentle Night’ - suggested by my father, this is a painful comedy about the wedding night of John Ruskin and Effie Gray in Scotland in 1848.

‘Cured’ - based on the case notes of the controversial surgeon Isaac Baker Brown in 1860s London.

‘Dido’ - inspired by a portrait at Kenwood House in Hampstead: in the 1770s, a mixed-race girl, raised by her great-uncle, discovers what life is like outside the garden wall.

‘The Last Rabbit’ - the story of Mary Toft, who in the 1720s managed to trick all of England by claiming to have given birth to eighteen rabbits.

‘The Necessity of Burning’ - a female brewer gets caught up in the Peasants Revolt in Cambridge in the 1380s.

‘Revelations’ - narrated by a maverick Presbyterian minister, this is the story of a Scottish cult’s attempt to fast for forty days in Dumfriesshire in 1786.

‘Salvage’ - set on the storm-swept Norfolk Coast in 1823, when a crippled lady scholar of Anglo-Saxon intervened to save drowning sailors.

‘Night Vision’ - in Donegal in 1824, a blind girl fought for the right to educate herself.

‘Figures of Speech’ - in Genoa in 1632, an Irish countess, facing childbirth, looks back at her turbulent past.

‘A Short Story’ - about the brief life of Caroline Crachami, the world’s shortest girl - a popular freak-show attraction until her death in London in 1823.

‘The Fox on the Line’ - set in London in the 1870s, this story about the moment when two women tried to get vivisection banned.

‘How a Lady Dies’ - the story of a consumptive gentlewoman with a death-wish in 1759 Bath.

‘Looking for Petronilla’ - history mixes with fantasy as a contemporary woman goes to Kilkenny in search of traces of Petronilla de Meath, the fourteenth-century maid of Ireland’s most famous witch.

‘Words for Things’ - in Cork in 1786, a teenage girl forms a complex bond with her governess, one Mistress Mary Wollstonecraft.

June 6 2013
7 hrs and 52 mins

(Re-upload. Metadata was adjusted, cover art and epub added, but otherwise as-is. A clip from the story ‘Revelations’ is repeated at the end of the file, after the narration has completed.)