The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits

Read Time: 3 Minutes

This is one of those books where the idea alone is fascinating: take odd scraps of history such as a court record, a news clipping, a rumour passed down and spin a story from it. Emma Donoghue doesn’t just retell these fragments; she imagines the people behind them, filling in the silences with lives that feel whole, flawed, and very human.

Some of the tales are unsettling in that “truth is stranger than fiction” way. The title story about a woman giving birth to rabbits is both bizarre and grotesque. What started as a flippant joke to prank her husband spiralled out of control until she was turned into a sort of sideshow attraction for doctors. Others are deeply sad, like the woman whose chronic back pain was “treated” with what we’d now recognise as a clitoridectomy.

It’s impossible not to feel the horror that something like that was once accepted as medicine, and the unease knowing it hasn’t disappeared entirely. It’s a grim reminder that medical exploitation of women’s bodies has a long, ugly history that still echoes today.

There are lighter moments too, if you can call them that. The tale of the Irish soldier being plied with drink until he unknowingly marries a spinster has a darkly comic edge, while the group who locked themselves away waiting for the second coming is both tragic and absurd. The final story, Looking for Petronilla, I think was ultimately my favourite of the seventeen or so short stories in the collection.

Some stories gripped me more than others, but that unevenness feels almost fitting. History itself is messy, with some lives flashing bright and others fading into fragments.

What ties the collection together is Donoghue’s empathy. She writes with care for people who rarely got a voice in the official record: women, the poor, the disabled, the non-conforming, the uneducated. Instead of academic distance, she makes these hidden histories accessible and emotionally resonant, reminding us that the grand narratives of kings and wars are built on countless small, fragile lives.

The themes are often bleak, touching on loss, betrayal, and survival against impossible odds, but there’s also resilience, wit, and flashes of kindness. That balance kept the book from being a grim trudge through suffering. It left me thinking less about the sensational details and more about the people themselves, and how easily they were forgotten.

The narration and production were excellent. I couldn’t tell you who did which story out of the four narrators – Jilly Bond, Caroline Lennon, Maggie Mash, Cathleen McCarron – but each brought presenc and gravitas to the stories they told.

Overall, while not every story stuck with me, some lodged under my skin and stayed there long after listening. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits isn’t a comfort read, but it is an intriguing one, especially if you like your history a bit weird, but also personal and a little unsettling.

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