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Emma Donoghue
I'm late to the party, having never heard of this author until I saw her mentioned in one of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hrj's posts in LHMP, but on that basis I ordered two of Donoghue's books, Kissing the Witch (1997) and The Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) through our local indie bookstore. Both are collections of short stories about women's lives, In Rabbits (which I just finished), each story is based on tantalizing story-fragments surviving from the lives of actual women in history (the title character perpetrated, in the 18th century, the fraud that she had given birth to numerous rabbits, all of whom alas died at birth). Another protagonist is Elizabeth Bell, a black gentrywoman in England whose story also became the 2013 movie Belle. One story is set during the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England, and another has a peripheral character named Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, with whom shalmestere and I are familiar because he wrote a collection of sacred "filks" of secular songs in the 14th century and, infuriatingly, didn't write down any of the music, saying only "this is sung to the tune of _____, which everybody knows."
Donoghue has a knack for engagingly capturing a feel of daily life, of the choices ordinary people (especially women) make to survive in the world. I'm not sure what to say beyond that: the stories and the sometimes-scanty historical facts on which they're based speak for themselves. Highly recommended.
In Witch, each story is a retelling of a classic fairy tale. I have nothing to say about this yet, as I haven't gotten it out ofshalmestere's hands to read it for myself.
hrj's posts in LHMP, but on that basis I ordered two of Donoghue's books, Kissing the Witch (1997) and The Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) through our local indie bookstore. Both are collections of short stories about women's lives, In Rabbits (which I just finished), each story is based on tantalizing story-fragments surviving from the lives of actual women in history (the title character perpetrated, in the 18th century, the fraud that she had given birth to numerous rabbits, all of whom alas died at birth). Another protagonist is Elizabeth Bell, a black gentrywoman in England whose story also became the 2013 movie Belle. One story is set during the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England, and another has a peripheral character named Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, with whom shalmestere and I are familiar because he wrote a collection of sacred "filks" of secular songs in the 14th century and, infuriatingly, didn't write down any of the music, saying only "this is sung to the tune of _____, which everybody knows."Donoghue has a knack for engagingly capturing a feel of daily life, of the choices ordinary people (especially women) make to survive in the world. I'm not sure what to say beyond that: the stories and the sometimes-scanty historical facts on which they're based speak for themselves. Highly recommended.
In Witch, each story is a retelling of a classic fairy tale. I have nothing to say about this yet, as I haven't gotten it out of
shalmestere's hands to read it for myself.