Delivering Childbirth: Orlando Project Encoding

This paper arose out of the question how women during the long eighteenth century wrote of their experiences during childbirth - or even whether they wrote about them at all.⁽²⁾ Certainly in novels in this period and beyond it childbirth is often all but invisible or unwritable: in extreme cases a heroine wakes up in bed with a dear little baby beside her. (Charlotte M. Yonge is one well-known author - later than the sample investigated in this paper - who has been criticised for presenting improbably sudden and unheralded births.) In most contexts, we now know, the myth of women's silence turns out not to stand up as fact. Is childbirth an exception?

Take, for instance, a text not mentioned in the Orlando Project: the diary of a somebody's great-grandmother, a Scottish immigrant to Ontario during the nineteenth century. Her diary describes her marriage and business travels with her husband. It has just one single gap, of several weeks, after which comment on everyday activities resumes. A few days later comes a mention, the first mention, of "the baby". If you go back in your reading at this point, searching for clues, you'll find just one: a reference to sewing new shifts. The pregnancy, as well as the birth, was unwritten, unwritable.

Contrast that with where we are today. Among any number of recent uninhibited accounts of pregnancy, Jayne Anne Phillips's recent MotherKind was called in a review by Justine Jordan "leg-crossingly explicit about the ravages of childbirth."⁽³⁾ Just how foreign to this were the writing practices of women in the past?

A second motive force for this paper is the ongoing process of testing the computer encoding being done by the Orlando Project. As we compose our electronic history of women's writing in the British Isles, we encode our historical-critical text according to our tag set, the application of SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language) designed by ourselves for capturing information about women's experience and women's writings. This paper is therefore based on searching the tags we have devised for experience of childbirth (which have been heavily used in this period) and for texts about or referring to childbirth (of which there are far fewer before the late twentieth century). It deals with the "long" eighteenth century, beginning in 1660 or just before, and ending in 1820 or a little after.

We always insist that our work is not susceptible of statistical analysis, that it offers not a representative sample but a partial, snapshot view. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the category writer is hazy, especially for women of the early period, and our understanding of it may not be shared by others. Secondly, since art is long and life is short, we have taken a more or less arbitrary decision about where to draw the line between writers included and those reluctantly set aside for the moment. The date limits set to the sample examined in this paper are just as arbitrary. Furthermore, many writers are necessarily omitted from consideration because there is no information about their childbearing or childlessness.

Evidence about childbearing is patchy. Miscarriages and stillbirths were seldom recorded. (When a miscarriage of Frances, Lady Hertford, was reported by newspapers on 23 Feb 1722 the news was dynastic, not bodily. Hertford and her husband stood in line for a dukedom and had no son as yet.) The upper classes leave the best records: we know, for instance, that Lady Caroline Lamb had miscarriages. There is no record of Sophia King's reproductive life at all, though her poems about the ghosts of babies suggest that she may have suffered miscarriages or stillbirths. Eliza Fenwick had two children born nine years apart: she very likely had other unsuccessful pregnancies during those nine years.

Children dying young may get stricken from the record too. A woman mentioned as childless may have had children who failed to survive. A woman who is said to have eight children may have been through eight pregnancies; or else she may have borne more children and lost several of them early. (Wordsworth's poem "We Are Seven" haunts anyone working with this material.) And though the paper assumes that unmarried women were childless unless there is evidence to the contrary, illicit births to single women are likely to evade the record.⁽⁴⁾

So we cannot put faith in statistics drawn from the Orlando Project, or in results compiled from it by number. Nevertheless such results have their own fascination, and a few will be offered here. The first search was on the tag for Children in documents about women's lives. The first finding confirms something that one might have looked on as a cliché or received opinion ripe for contradiction. (Women's literary history has a way of challenging, rather than endorsing, received opinion.) It is a cliché that women writers are generally childless. In fact, of the 236 women forming the material for this paper (mostly British, but a few of them American or French or West Indian), 116 were childless: almost 50%, a much higher percentage than that of childless women among the population as a whole.

Still, it would be rash to suppose a cause-and-effect relationship: either that these women were childless because they were writers, or that they were writers because they were childless. Of those 116 who did not bear children, only 23 were married, while 93 were unmarried. So any relationship that might exist will be a relationship between writing and celibacy, not between writing and infertility of any kind. It seems likely that celibacy and writing were often parallel effects of a single cause - lack of money - rather than that either one was the cause of the other. A woman from almost any rank was unlikely to marry in this period unless she could bring a prospective husband some sort of appropriate dowry. Shortage of money kept women single. And shortage of money was also, in a high proportion of cases, implicated either in a woman's writing at all, or in her choosing to publish. The money nexus would be the basis for a separate study.

So the sample showed 120 women who both wrote and bore children. They were not the only ones with experience of childbirth, nor the only ones who brought up children. Since a pregnant woman would invite perhaps half a dozen female friends and relatives to offer moral and practical support when she went into labour, a woman who never gave birth might have attended numerous childbeds.

Some, too, who never gave birth were nevertheless not strictly childless. Many women acquired stepchildren on marrying. Anna Letitia Barbauld and her husband adopted one of her brother's children while he was very young; Helen Maria Williams took on (at an older age) her sister's two. Barbara Hofland and Susanna Haswell Rowson adopted children their husbands had fathered outside marriage.⁽⁵⁾ Winifred Thimelby, a nun and prioress who was called, coincidentally, "the most loved of all the Mothers" of her convent, implored her family by letter to "give me a child" - and a niece was duly despatched to join the convent as a novice.⁽⁶⁾ Elizabeth Montagu adopted a nephew: a more formal arrangement than Barbauld's, designed to supply an heir to property rather than a child to bring up. And many women, like the famous scholar Elizabeth Carter, mothered their younger siblings.⁽⁷⁾

Others, like Anne Bradstreet, Charlotte Lennox, Katherine Philips, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, and the ill-fated Mary Brunton, bore children at length, but only after long years of childless marriage. There is no evidence about Lennox, but the others were all deeply grieved by their childlessness while it lasted. Most of these were married very young: Philips, Bradstreet, and Devonshire at sixteen, and Lennox at not much older. Devonshire had several miscarriages, and kept track of her menstrual periods as part of the effort to conceive. At the other extreme of fertility, Mary Ann Radcliffe was fifteen, and Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith were only just sixteen, when each bore her first child. Radcliffe went on to have eight and Smith twelve.

Women's control over their own reproductive history must have been limited. It is generally said that the ancestor of the condom was understood in Britain by professional prostitutes but not by other women. Midwives had herbal prescriptions for abortion, though use of them was illegal and punishments were heavy. Breast-feeding (that is, providing the child's entire food intake from the breast) was known to have a contraceptive effect; yet the upper classes did not often practise it in the earlier part of this period.

We found only one remark implying contraceptive practice: Mary Rich, Lady Warwick, says she and her husband felt that their two children (born within two years of each other) were enough; but their method may well have been abstinence. After both children were dead they tried to conceive again but failed. Ellen Weeton, longing for another child when her daughter was sixteen months old, felt unable to mention her desire to her husband, who was both unloving and unlovable. Probably what she means is that he had stopped sexual relations and she could not propose to him resuming them.

Alice Thornton wrote that she first became pregnant about seven weeks after her marriage, which implies effective understanding of the way conception works. But her knowledge had its limits. When a baby was born feet first and died, she thought it had been "turned wrong" by a bad fall she had three months before the birth, from catching her feet in her skirt. She felt particularly badly because the dead baby was male. The hope for a son and heir is a strong thread in her life-writing, and makes one distrust her witness when she says her pregnancies differed according to the sex of the baby, "beeing much stronger and lively when I was with my sons then daughters."⁽⁸⁾ This kind of differentiation was very common when there were obvious reasons of status and future prospects for desiring to bear a son.

Any attempt to calculate how many times these 120 child-bearing women gave birth will reveal the flimsiness of the historical record. The statistics positively teem with 'probablys' and 'possiblys'. So many recordings of 'at least' so many children (this article takes the figure actually given in these cases), or of 'several' (we have arbitrarily counted three) or of 'a large family' (we have counted five). In other words, the counting is conservative; the undiscoverable actual total was almost certainly larger than the one recorded here. Miscarriages, where recorded, are counted as the equivalent of childbirth, but the number counted of these probably diverges even further downwards from the true figure than the number counted of live births.

On this basis, these 120 women went through 493 childbirths (or occasionally miscarriages) between them: an average of just over four each. One might expect more; but this includes 23 only children and about the same number of twosomes. So the other seventy-odd women averaged about six births each.

The highest numerical scores are awesome. Susanna Wesley bore nineteen children, ten of whom survived to grow up and several to become famous. The non-survivors included two sets of twins. Ann, Lady Fanshawe, had six miscarriages and 14 children born alive, so she gave birth twenty times if we count her triplets as three births instead of one. (Nine of these, including the triplets, were dead within about a year after the last birth, in 1665.) (Fanshawe, though strictly too early for this study, proved irresistible.) Hester Thrale bore twelve children and miscarried at least twice - she recorded two miscarriages, anyhow, each of which gave her particular cause to grieve. Four more women on the list had twelve children each: Anne Grant, Katherine Colace Ross, Charlotte Smith, and Sarah Trimmer. The other women in this sample recorded single figures for births, though Elizabeth Cobbold bore seven children after marrying a man who had fourteen already.

This is not a paper about the deaths of children. That too would be a different study, and a heart-breaking one. But it is very striking how often, when women do write about childbirth, they do so under the spur of loss of a child, or loss of a friend. Death, unlike birth, was a traditional topic for writing, an opportunity to go into detail. And clearly the deaths of children were a factor in women's experiences of childbirth: one of the factors like age, health, and marital and material circumstances, which dictated a woman's emotional experience of childbirth. All these will be touched on, as well as the seldom-described physical experience.

Complications in childbirth affected only one or two in every hundred births, across the country and across this period. But personal experience rather than statistical information is what nurtures either fear or confidence. The most anxious mothers-to-be must have included women whose own mothers had died in childbed (especially, perhaps, those whose own birth had killed their mothers: poor Mary Shelley!), or whose early memories included the deaths of many little siblings (six half or whole siblings of Rachel Russell died while she was a child), or who had actually witnessed bad experiences suffered by a mother or an elder sister. Alice Thornton, whose elder sister had died at thirty during her sixteenth pregnancy, was particularly unwilling to marry.⁽⁹⁾

But still, childbirth anxiety remains a very individual matter. Ann Taylor Gilbert, the eldest of a family which suffered some casualties, wrote: "From my earliest childhood I had a nervous apprehension of the sudden death of those about me, so that any inequality of the breathing, if asleep, or anything unusual in appearance, excited my alarm."⁽¹⁰⁾ Yet her fairly outspoken personal writings say nothing of anxiety in her first pregnancy.

Then there were childbirths made into an ordeal by external circumstances: bereavement, imprisonment, advancing age, poverty, travel, or illegitimacy. Anne Audland, a Quaker minister who travelled and preached during her marriage, bore her son a few days after her husband died. Charlotte Smith bore her second baby just as her first gave up the struggle to live. Hester Biddle, another Quaker preacher, probably bore her son Daniel in Newgate. She was by no means the only woman to give birth in prison: Elizabeth Cellier the midwife apparently had several clients in the Tower of London. Carolina Nairne and Frances Burney each bore her only child at over forty. Ann Yearsley was about six months gone in the last of her six fruitful pregnancies when her family (herself, her mother, who died soon afterwards, her husband and children) were discovered sheltering in a barn during a hard winter, and near starvation.

Elizabeth Fenton bore the eldest of her six children in the island of Mauritius on her way to New Zealand as an emigrant.⁽¹¹⁾ Elizabeth Smith (formerly Elizabeth Grant) was pregnant for the whole of her voyage home from India, though she managed to reach England before bearing her eldest child. Susanna Moodie bore six of her seven children in frontier conditions as a pioneer in Canada; yet it was the first labour, in England (or the last seven hours of it), which she described as "beating all that I had ever imagined of mortal suffering."⁽¹²⁾ Charlotte Smith bore the last of her twelve babies in a crumbling French chateau where the family had fled on account of her husband's debts; local priests came and carried the infant off through deep snow for compulsory Catholic baptism.

Each of the two late-eighteenth-century Duchesses of Devonshire were despatched to Continental Europe to bear children who were not their husbands', in conditions of imposed secrecy which involved real physical hardship. In the case of Duchess Georgiana, she had already borne a child - not merely legitimate but also male - in almost equally difficult conditions, just outside Paris after her family's travel plans had been disrupted by the Revolution. The peculiar arrangements of this very unusual family made it imperative for the duke's mistress Lady Elizabeth Foster (who became duchess after Georgiana's death) to show herself and her slim figure at fashionable social occasions as Georgiana lay in labour, so that all the world would know that this was the legitimate son and heir, not just another mistress's child.⁽¹³⁾

Several women who were also writers bore children out of wedlock - or something like that. Delarivier Manley got pregnant after going through a form of marriage which was in fact invalid since her husband had another wife living; and as her marriage was bigamous, so her son was illegitimate.

Anna Maria Bennett made no pretence about the paternity of her son and daughter, who were known as Thomas and Harriet Bennett Pye, after her protector, Admiral Pye. Charlotte Dacre had three children by William Byrne, proprietor of the Morning Post, while she was his mistress. When she eventually married Byrne (the youngest child being about six), she signed the register by her birth name: Charlotte King, spinster. Mary Wells (who later called herself Leah Sumbel) bore four children to Edward Topham as his mistress. A portrait of her with daughters is entitled "Mrs Topham"; but the breakup of the relationship meant the devastating loss of contact with her daughters. Even Frances Wright, the radical or revolutionary, took the opportunity when her younger, legitimate daughter died, to bestow her birthdate and legitimate status on her elder daughter, who had been born outside marriage.

Of the two Duchesses of Devonshire already mentioned, Lady Elizabeth Foster already had two legitimate sons (lost to her when she left her first marriage) at the time when she bore the two fathered by - probably - the Duke (whom she had not yet married). The second of her Devonshire children was conceived almost on the same date as the Duke's second child by his then wife, Georgiana, who, a couple of years after these births, in her turn bore an illegitimate child.

In contrast with this profligate upper-class fertility, most of the avowed courtesan writers were childless (including Harriette Wilson, who, though born in wedlock herself, had a mother and maternal grandmother who were both illegitimate). Grace Elliott, however, had one daughter, whose paternity was contested among some eminent claimants: the Prince of Wales (later George IV), the French royal duke by now known as Philippe Egalité, and the playwright Arthur Murphy.

The number of women writers who died in childbirth seems quite low, but is probably not far off the average of around one in every hundred births. There is Mary Wollstonecraft of course, and Mary Brunton (like Wollstonecraft a victim of puerperal fever), and Mary Scott, who died "under circumstances of a painfully interesting kind," that is, late in a pregnancy (like Charlotte Brontë at a later date).⁽¹⁴⁾ Mary Shelley had a very narrow escape from bleeding to death following a miscarriage. (Her husband, though not renowned for his practicality, saved her by packing her in ice.)

Records are often obscure or wilfully silent on this and related topics. Anne Wharton died young after years of illness, and Germaine Greer suspects that the source may have been venereal disease: contracted perhaps through child-abuse. It may have been perceived to be green-sickness, which was supposedly curable by sexual activity - which Wharton's husband, in the later years of their marriage, refused her. The mysterious crippling illness which seized Mary Robinson in her twenties may perhaps have stemmed from a miscarriage with complications, suffered on a desperate post-chaise journey. If so, that is another case of the unwritable.

Today all this may sound today like wonderful copy for writers. Moving on to search for material about childbirth in writing documents, after searching in biography documents (that is, to search in material about the history of women's writings after searching in material about their lives), arouses high hopes in the literary historian. One would like to find, for instance, a historical progression from the attitudes represented by calling labour pains "the rod of [God's] correction", to Ann Taylor Gilbert's remarkable statement about her first childbed: "surely of the pleasures attending this time of peril the one-half was not told me."⁽¹⁵⁾

This search through writing documents was conducted on tags which capture plot outlines, themes, motifs, character types (for midwives, pregnant women, etc.), and imagery. In interpreting the results from this second kind of search, statistics become still less meaningful, for whereas women's reproductive experience will always be recorded and tagged in an Orlando document (if it is known), their writing about childbirth would be recorded and tagged only if the tagger thought it significant enough, in competition with all the other aspects of her writing, to warrant the space and time for putting it in. And as we have written elsewhere, this is not the kind of tagging in which fully consistent practice is possible.⁽¹⁶⁾

All results are therefore tentative. Tentatively, we can say there is less description of, and comment on, pregnancy and childbirth than on other health issues, or on death: perhaps not the abjection of the maternal body, but a reticence on the part of women writers about the female body, whether their own or somebody else's.

Religious and political attitudes early in the period allowed uninhibited mention of the female body, but only in particular contexts. Hester Biddle, denouncing judgement and destruction to the wicked, repeatedly likens their suffering to that of a woman in childbirth; but then she also likens spiritual sin to menstrual rags. Aphra Behn congratulates the queen on her pregnancy (with the future Old Pretender), but the king on the actual birth. Mary Carey, among many others, firmly believed that "'Tis my need of Afflictions that causes a loving God to send them" in the form of deaths of children. Her poem "Upon the Sight of my Abortive Birth", written around New Year 1657, is very largely taken up with efforts to arrive at a proper acceptance of God's propensity for taking away. Yet it also insists that the not-yet-formed body. "a poore despissed creature, / A little Embrio; voyd of life, and feature," is God's work just as the soul is.⁽¹⁷⁾

The silences which provoked this research might seem to be more often broken as the eighteenth century advances, and then grow to thicker again. First-time readers of Maria Edgeworth's final novel, Helen, 1834, are likely to be surprised when the husband of the secondary heroine becomes furiously angry with her for jumping her horse over a small obstacle. But some pages later his wife produces a baby. The anger which had seemed totally unreasonable comes to seem at least less so.⁽¹⁸⁾

A sense of delicacy and privacy often seems paramount in what concerns the body, more so than in what concerns the mind or soul. Anne Grant (who herself bore twelve children) writes a full and moving account of Mary Brunton in her last days, before her death of puerperal fever. Particularly touching are the details relayed about Brunton's holding the hand of her stillborn son (the result, Grant implies, of the first pregnancy in a nineteen-year marriage). But Grant sums up the preceding labour in just five words: "three days of great suffering."⁽¹⁹⁾

Edgeworth and Grant contrast sharply with Mary Wollstonecraft, whose reformist agenda demanded a critique of the enforced, inhibiting standards of female delicacy. She uses women's reproductive experiences in The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, published in 1798, to epitomise their oppression. Raped and sexually abused at a young age, the working-class Jemima finds herself pregnant, disowned by her father, a destitute outcast. She takes a medicine designed to produce abortion, which she barely survives. She feels no guilt for this, but bitterly regrets having later procured herself a secure billet as mistress by encouraging her protector to throw out his pregnant servant just as she herself had been thrown out. The servant kills herself. Jemima's redemption and reintegration into society begins as she decides to help Maria get back her baby daughter, who was snatched away in the act of suckling.

Yet reticence persists in Mary Shelley, the radicals' daughter. On the death of her first, premature baby, she wrote hauntingly of her emotional loss, and recorded the pain of thinking "that I was a mother & am so no longer." We owe to Percy Shelley the information that the birth was easy (the baby arrived five minutes before the doctor), and that after it Mary was "perfectly well & at ease." She herself says she got up on the fourth day, came downstairs on the sixth, and moved house on the eighth. (It was very definitely a bohemian household.) But she tells us no more, and after this her journals offer no further detail about births. Only years later did she write about the feelings produced by her dangerous miscarriage.⁽²⁰⁾ Frances Burney wrote a fervent letter to her husband before bearing her son, and another to her father afterwards; and she wrote of her mastectomy, but not of the birth.

Pregnancy, too, seems to be seldom treated with any detail in life-writing texts, even though it may on occasion be mentioned in connection with other topics. An early eighteenth-century letter-writer remarking that young Mrs So-and-So "goes on bravely with her great belly" is indulging in a very private gossip often tucked away in never-to-be-published archives but seldom audible in more literary contexts.⁽²¹⁾ Writing so near the oral tradition has not been frequently quoted in the Orlando textbase; and it is hard to imagine that this kind of remark would strike anyone tagging a correspondence as worthy of being foregrounded with a tag.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu during her first pregnancy made conventional mention to her husband of her "condition". The following week she mentioned headaches and spleen, but gave no detail. Instead she wrote, "A Physician should be the only Confidante of Bodily Pains." Years later she wrote to her daughter of being pregnant with her as "[t]hat part of [my life] which we pass'd together." Hester Thrale called a baby she was carrying "my little Companion".⁽²²⁾

These are intriguing ways of naming the state of pregnancy; they are not recorded in the Orlando textbase. But then Orlando makes no claim to include everything known about the writers it covers. It flags Hester Thrale Piozzi as someone whose experience of childbearing would repay attention. About her, as about Mary Carey or Mary Shelley, a user of the Orlando textbase will be pointed, through our citations, in the direction of the women's own written (and now published) texts. In the same way, this paper will use facts which are not all incorporated in Orlando, but to all of which Orlando points.

Hester Thrale's probably unique "Children's Book" is a remarkable record: educationally, medically, and emotionally. Of her second pregnancy she wrote, "I never had a Day's Health during the whole Gestation - the Labour was however particularly short & easy." Another time she was sitting late at night with her husband and Samuel Johnson when "I felt sudden & violent pains come on; I hasted to bed" - and she gave birth within two hours. She had easy labours with babies born before their time, and harder ones with later and bigger babies. But as years went on and more and more children died, and the loss of her sons and lack of a male heir became more painful, she preferred more and more to write at length about the children she had (even to write her constant, nagging anxiety for them) rather than writing about her latest childbirth experience.

Her comments on the births themselves tend to be short and wry. After one hard time she wrote only that the baby was "large & likely to live," after another, "The Labour was rough & tight, but no Boy nor no Death ensued," after another, "the Lying In is delightful." There is always more about death than about birth, more about emotional reaction than about physical process. Yet she is the author of one of the sharpest phrases for fertile marriage which the eighteenth century produced: she described her first marriage as "holding my head over a Bason Six Months in the Year".⁽²³⁾

Of the midwives in this sample, Jane Sharp used earthy language about the detail of other women's labours. Elizabeth Cellier wrote of the history of childbirth and of ways of managing it (with mother-and-child mortality statistics for London) rather than of the process itself. Sarah Stone, in her Complete Practice of Midwifery, 1737, keeps policy and theory for her extensive preface, and devotes the body of her work to forty-three difficult cases (in which the average labour was almost three days and three nights). Difficult cases, she explains, are rare, but she selects them to demonstrate her skill in saving all but three of the mothers, and more than half the babies, when other midwives, and in one case even a doctor, had despaired. Patients in these stories are in dire trouble when first Stone encounters them, and she feelingly records their pain and fear. One has "the symptoms of Death in her face, and all spectators pronouncing Death against her;" another had "often begg'd the Women to kill her" to end her pain; another is "reduced to the utmost degree of Weakness . . . . her spirits quite exhausted."

From Stone we learn of the various positions in use for labour: in bed, on a "close-stool" or commode full of warm water, on a birthing stool (not a method which Stone favoured, though she believed in allowing the woman herself freedom to choose her own position), kneeling, leaning on the back of a chair, or even standing up (which proved fatal in one case she recounts). We learn too of the medicines (or magic potions) used by ignorant country midwives: Stone had a particular dislike for the use of "the Husband's Water with the juice of Leeks." We learn just how long women were sometimes left unaided in futile labour when the child was stuck fast against the pelvic bone, how Stone herself could turn a child in the womb in the most difficult positions, and how when desperate she wrapped the protruding feet of a baby in linen, attached a rope and got two strong women to haul on it.⁽²⁴⁾

She says nothing of her own childbed experience - even if she ever experienced a difficult labour, it was something which had no place in a professional treatise. (Sharp and Cellier are similarly silent.) Nor does Stone ever say if a baby is male or female, longed-for or the opposite.⁽²⁵⁾ She focuses on the physical and emotional experience; the social and familial issues which most appeal to novelists are none of her business.

Sarah Stone's kind of material seldom got into diaries. Of course the most uninhibited diarist of the period is Ann Lister, and her sexual activity was strictly lesbian, not leading to childbirth. Of women revealed in these searches, only Alice Thornton and Elizabeth Freke rival Lister in willingness to detail their own bodily experiences. Freke mentions her miscarriages. Thornton gives many physical details, and a dream she had of being "laid in childe-bed, had the white sheete spread, and all over it was sprinkled with smale drops of pure blood, as if it had bin dashed with one's hand."⁽²⁶⁾

Freke was in labour with her son Ralph "4 or 5 days," attended by an aunt, sister, four midwives, and a man-midwife. By that time the man-midwife was convinced the child was dead, and "was putting on his Butchers habit" to apply instruments for cutting it up inside the womb and so removing it, when "My Great & Good God thatt Never Failed me or deneyed my Reasonable Request, Raisd me up a good Woman Midwife." This woman delivered the child in three hours work. He appeared to be dead, "hurt wth severall Greatt holes In his Head" (presumably from the man-midwife's efforts with forceps); but he survived. The fact that his leg had been broken in the birth was not revealed for three years.⁽²⁷⁾

The Orlando text archive reveals almost nothing of this excruciating physicality in fiction of the period, and representation of only a few of those daunting social circumstances for giving birth which were mentioned above as illegitimacy, travel, poverty, bereavement, imprisonment, age. As to illegitimacy, Wollstonecraft has already been mentioned. Everyone remembers how Defoe's Moll Flanders makes arrangements for successive births but says nothing about her pregnancies or labours. Some of Defoe's female contemporaries differ from him here. Delarivier Manley uses extramarital childbirth to relate a pair of moral-satirical vignettes in the New Atalantis, 1709: linked by theme, contrasted by class. On the one hand a young countrywoman is impregnated, along with many others in her district, by one of a passing division of soldiers - so that her pregnancy results not from choice, or sexual desire, but from patriarchal political forces - and is later hanged for the 'murder of her bastard child.' On the other hand, an upper-class lady is brought by closed carriage to a remote place where she gives birth under a tree. Her infant is removed in sinister secrecy, and we learn nothing of her fate, or of who impregnated - seduced? raped? - her. In this latter case the midwife is a sinister, not a caring, figure.

Eliza Haywood's heroine Fantomina, after charming and seducing her lover and fallguy in a series of disguises, always able to gratify her own desire while appearing chaste and reluctant every time, has her power abruptly ended by her pregnancy (coupled with the re-appearance of her conveniently absent mother). She falls in premature labour in public, bears a daughter (without much physical detail), and is duly packed off to a convent. These early novelists, more concerned with social margins and transgressions than with socially-sanctioned courtship, present pregnancy as a trap to avoid - and that is without considering the murder of their pregnant partners by Behn's Oronooko and Hayward's male hero-villain in The Mercenary Lover.⁽²⁸⁾

The novelist Phebe Gibbes uses an episode of illicit pregnancy to protest the unequal condition of the sexes in The Life and Adventures of Mr Francis Clive, more than forty years before Wollstonecraft.⁽²⁹⁾ This features a preliminary story most unusual in its graphic engagement with the unacceptable: an illegitimate pregnancy and death from an abortion administered with the connivance of the seducer. He is the father of the novel's hero; the victim, as in Wollstonecraft, comes from the labouring class. Hannah, who had been maid to Mr Clive's first wife, is easily persuaded to take her place when she dies. She expects Mr Clive to marry her; when, pregnant, she realises that he is not going to do this, she sends to the apothecary for the fearsome potion which she knows may kill her, and duly expires after a night and day of agonising convulsions.⁽³⁰⁾

Towards the 1790s illegitimacy becomes a shaping force in novels by women registering protest against the present social order: Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Anna Maria Bennett, and others, as well as Wollstonecraft. In two of these the issues surrounding birth itself are particularly central. The former of the two, Eliza Fenwick, uses the physical condition of pregnancy as a plot device, in a manner apparently aimed at changing society's attitudes to marriage and to the female body: a more far-reaching aim than either foiling evil seducers or changing the bastardy laws. In Fenwick's Secresy, 1795, Sibella Valmont, who has been raised as an uneducated child of nature, goes to bed with her childhood sweetheart, Clement Montgomery, for idealistic reasons. She means to assert the validity of the tie between them, which she reckons as real as any union sanctioned by Church and state. When she gets pregnant, her guardian uncle confines her even more rigidly than before in his castle; and the other heroine, Caroline Ashburn, plots to free her with the help of Arthur Murden, a romantic young man who fancies himself in love with the wood sprite whom he conceives Sibella to be.

Like other novelists, Fenwick is inexplicit about Sibella's pregnancy; but she has both artistic and ideological reasons for this. The reader may well miss the clues offered in Sibella's attack of giddiness, and in her telling her uncle something that provokes him to strike her. (She is by now heavily pregnant, yet on being struck she makes her own spirited bid for freedom: she scales a wall and swims the moat before being caught and brought back.)⁽³¹⁾ Arthur, unlike the reader, lacks these clues - but he knows that Sibella and Clement have made love. Appearing at Sibella's door at dead of night to carry her to freedom, he recoils, unmanned, from the sight of her pregnant body. In fact, he never gets over it. Arthur's shock at the loss of his sexist romantic fantasy about Sibella functions as an index of the confused moral values of society. He too is a reformist, a child of his age. He can stomach - albeit with emotional agony - the knowledge that Sibella is no longer a virgin. But the physical reality of her pregnancy is too much for him.

Margaret Croker is another who responds, in The Question: Who Is Anna? to the complex feelings swirling around extramarital pregnancy and birth. The literal answer to the title question is that Anna is the offspring of a teenage love affair. The social consequences of the birth lie in the hands of well-meaning and caring parents (or, now, grandparents), while its physical management falls to the housekeeper, Ruth, and the doctor. The latter brings the young mother safely through puerperal fever - in itself the sign of an independent-minded novelist, since puerperal fever is generally introduced into plots only as a killing instrument. Ruth understands the emotional issues better than her social superiors do. They see the extramarital status of this pregnancy as a problem to be firmly though tactfully dealt with; Ruth simply doesn't care.⁽³²⁾ They pack the young mother off to a convent; only Ruth objects that she and her baby will become strangers.

Those who managed the birth become Anna's surrogate parents and guardian angels. Anna's disaster is not a mother dead but a mother lost to her - a mother, indeed, who marries a peer and puts her pregnancy and birth behind her, suppressing their actuality as firmly as her relations, or as the most cautious of writers. Her second childbirth, in her exalted condition, is explicitly contrasted with her first: "As to the young Marquis, from the consequence that was given to his arrival, it might have been supposed that nobody ever had a child before, much less the lovely Duchess herself."⁽³³⁾ By implication this novel questions the separation of physical from emotional, questions the consequences of expunging childbirth, even illicit childbirth, from the record.

At mid-century male novelists may have been willing to go further than female ones in writing the physicality of pregnancy and birth. Lovelace's eagerness that Clarissa should be pregnant rests on the already old-fashioned scientific opinion that a woman could not conceive unless she had had an orgasm at the moment of conception: brutal rape, therefore, could not produce pregnancy. And Henry Fielding's Amelia represents Will Booth supporting his wife's body during her labour - though this was one of the 'low' details which early readers of the novel deplored.

Later in the century the sentimental novel handled childbirth with marked inexplicitness, though with sensibility and sometimes with political acuteness. Childbirth was on the agenda in different ways for sentimentalists and reformists. Sarah Isdell's The Irish Recluse; Or, Breakfast at the Rotunda alludes in its title to a famous Dublin maternity hospital.⁽³⁴⁾ Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (which will not be analysed here) projects the anxieties of childbirth to a plot position remote from their origins.

The search of Orlando's text archive turned up no sympathetically-portrayed fictional midwives. The closest we get to such a character are wet-nurses, or Ruth in The Question: Who Is Anna, or the 'monthly nurse' whom Harriet Downing makes the narrator for a series of tales of family life. All these, however, deal in infant care, not childbirth. Man-midwives crop up occasionally: always unflatteringly presented, though none is a butcher like Sterne's Dr Slop. The obscure playwright Sarah Gardner presents a self-important obstetrician who is creepily, voyeuristically fascinated by his female patients. The courtesan Harriette Wilson offers a glimpse of the reality, persisting in the age of the Man of Sentiment, of feelings of disgust about childbirth. Of her Dr Agitato she writes, "True, he had been an accoucheur, at the beck and call of any woman in the straw, but then Royal Patronage had washed all that dirt and filth from his hands."⁽³⁵⁾

The chances of dying in childbirth were probably much higher for a fictional character than for a living woman in the eighteenth century, especially if she was giving birth to a heroine. Frances Burney's Evelina is only one of many in books who find themselves, like Mary Shelley in life, in the position of having killed their mother. (In Evelina's case the mother's death was precipitated by an extreme sensibility and tenderness which are essentially fictional.) But such an event, preliminary to the plot and often not highlighted, will not necessarily be tagged in an Orlando document. A search on the tag for Orphan, used as a motif, would flush out some of these cases, but probably not all.

Novel heroines appear not to give birth at the higher end of the age range for fertility. The ones we found giving birth in poverty or physical confinement are mostly afflicted this way only temporarily - like the heroine of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire's sentimental Emma, or The Unfortunate Attachment, 1773. Emma's husband, having rejected her and left her to bear their baby in a squalid cottage, later forgives her for having loved another before loving him.

The novel developed several conventional plot motifs involving birth, which do not, however, usually address the mother's experience. Babies are switched at birth with important consequences (as in Burney's Evelina or Edgeworth's Ennui). Or a protagonist's birth may be shrouded in mystery by other means (this context accounts for much fictional maternal mortality). A popular opening scene in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries features the abrupt arrival at an inn or private house of an unknown pregnant woman (sometimes a fugitive, sometimes carrying the baby of a man known to be dead) who gives birth and either dies or departs as mysteriously as she appeared, leaving someone else literally holding the baby.⁽³⁶⁾

Though such novels typically make the mother a silent sign for the mystery which her child will later have to unravel, they evoke the reader's sympathy for the feelings which are not expressed. They parallel in a striking manner both the way that life-writers tend to focus on issues a little aside from those of birth itself, and the number of real-life women giving birth, perforce, while on a journey. Perhaps the popularity of this opening with women writers and readers spoke to some buried fears of childbirth in special difficulties; perhaps those difficulties have been depicted in fiction in order to provide an acceptable way of representing childbirth as scary.

Though many examples of this motif are somewhat bland, it packs remarkable power in the opening of Clan-Albin by Christian Isobel Johnstone, a Scottish National Tale of 1815. An epigraph from Pope conjures up the Unfortunate Lady of his elegy, dying in exile and buried by "foreign hands". The tale then opens, "In a dark and stormy night [honestly!] in November, 178-"⁽³⁷⁾ in the mountainous West Highlands. The first character sighted is a Gaelic speaker who calls himself "Ronald, - the smith's wife's husband" (Johnstone's Highlands, a tough environment both socially and physically, are unabashedly matriarchal).

Coming home two days late from a fair, fearing his wife's anger, Ronald comes on a stranger woman ("English, - or Irish, - or lowland") lying beside the mountain track in the throes of labour. With difficulty he gets her to his family's poor hut; the narrative gives no glimpse into her feelings, but dwells on his plans for saving and succouring her. She bears her child and dies, despite the best efforts of the wise woman of the clan, Unah or Old Moome. At the woman's death, says the narrator, Ronald is more shocked by the "abrupt termination of the little scheme his kindness had formed" than by her actual sufferings - which, of course, he cannot imagine.⁽³⁸⁾

This scene performs all the functions that the novelist requires of it. It gets the reader turning pages; it creates the local setting so vital to this novel; it starts the plot rolling (the baby duly grows up to be the protagonist); it drops the conventionally-required clue to the plot in the detail that something about the labouring woman reminds Moome of somebody else. Its power depends partly on its creation of a viewpoint within the story from which the woman in labour is seen: that of a lower-class Highlander who is nonetheless a man of feeling. The woman, for her part, is not a speaking subject (how can she be? none of them knows her language) yet the extremity of her plight is conveyed with excruciating force to the reader by her very isolation, by the way that the Highlanders' intense and generous sympathy is depicted as never getting through to her.

The sentimental heroine, from Mary Collyer's Felicia onwards,⁽³⁹⁾ is liable to rhapsodic feelings about the experience of motherhood: about the sight, touch, and especially the breast-feeding of her newborn baby. These fictional passages tend to say less than do diaries about the sheer relief of having survived the pain and anxiety of childbirth. Fictional husbands are charmed and delighted by the visual icon of the nursing heroine. Heroines sometimes demonstrate their magnanimity by (as some women did in life) taking on babies which are, explicitly or implicitly, the fruit of their husbands' or fiancés' extramarital or former relationships: Charlotte Smith tells such a story in Rambles Farther, 1796, a book for children!

The sentimental novelists, displacing the intensity of physical experience and reformulating it as intensity of emotion, contribute to expressing the inexpressibility of childbirth, to writing it as a fact whose detail vanishes into silence. By an opposite route, they are making a point related to that which Fenwick and Croker make with births concealed or buried in silence, and which Johnstone makes with a birth which pains the onlookers and hustles the mother away into silence and death.

It is remarkable that some the most speaking accounts of the developing foetus and of birth itself come from poetry, not diaries or novels. Not all poems about pregnancy treat it as a bodily function. Jane Cave, in her sequence of poems to an unborn child, is writing advice in case she should die in childbirth; she does not envisage the physical entity in her womb. Anna Letitia Barbauld, who never bore a child, writes a remarkably un-coy poem about somebody else's pregnancy in "To a Little Invisible Being who is expected shortly to become visible." Her language, permeated with religious feeling about the miracle of conception and growth in the womb, recalls that of Christmas carols or perhaps of Pope's Messiah.

An earlier poet than Barbauld had handled the childbirth theme even more forcefully, in a different poetic style: the apparently unmarried Elizabeth Boyd. Her poem "On the Death of an Infant of five Days old, being a beautiful but abortive Birth" resembles Mary Carey's poem on this topic only in its title. The pain of childbirth is still an important issue, but it is placed in the context of a purely human sorrow rather than (as by Carey) one of religious acquiescence. It is now the disappointed mother's relationship with her husband, rather than that with God, which faces crisis. "Oh!" writes Boyd, "could the stern-soul'd Sex, but know the Pain, / Or the soft Mother's Agonies sustain, / With tend'rest Love the obdurate Heart would burn, / And the shock'd Father, Tear for Tear return." Emotional response to miscarriage, or premature birth, is presented as an exclusively female experience, no matter how Boyd may regret male inability to feel it. Maternal emotion stems not from the woman's soul or her sensibility but directly from the recent throes of her body - and this in a collection which, from its title, seems addressed mainly to a male readership.⁽⁴⁰⁾

Boyd had already written, in her crabbed, whimsical, paradoxical poem called Variety, about foetal growth and about the process of birth. Here the developing embryo is "a Chaos'd Ball . . . lumpous . . . purplous." Boyd, an enthusiastic coiner of new words, had no accurate account of foetal development in the medical literature to help with her poetic description, but she had the vocabulary with which poets since Milton had described God's cosmic creation. In Variety she uses embryo growth as an example of organic change, and birth as an example of violent eruptions of energy alongside the example of shipwreck.

In another of her poems in this volume, "Macareus to Aeolus", the birth of a child incestuously conceived is narrated in equally heroic terms. This newborn "Swift, as descending Gods in Whirlwinds came; / Th'unartful Babe, no studied Art foreknows: / Pungent his Birth'pains, more feeling After-throws." As in her later poem on the prematurely born baby, Boyd's project here is defence of the maternal figure (as the larger project of Variety is to glorify that changefulness for which women are often blamed). Canace has died in bearing a baby by her brother Macareus. The brother is left behind, and in Boyd's words he "accuses himself; defends their Crime; and resolves on Death."⁽⁴¹⁾ To accuse himself while justifying the incest sounds a little confused; and Macareus is confused. But he is absolutely clear that to go through childbirth settles all scores.

Boyd, writing here of a birth which is exceptional in that it follows serious sin, seems bent on expressing not only the horrors of her mythological story, but the general force and terror of the natural process of birth, and a sense that women who have gone through this are in some way entitled - to understanding from those who have not borne children, and to forgiveness if they need it. Her highly mannered verse style proves capable of expressing contemporary medical opinion (that the baby was responsible for fighting its way out) at the same time that it opposes medical art to the natural processes which obey no rules.

Although the long eighteenth century was a great age of life-writing and of novel-writing, the Orlando Project text archive turns up (so far!) no writer of those genres in this period who approaches as closely as Boyd not only to the issues surrounding birth but also to the process itself. Searching the archive for information about childbearing in this period reveals a wealth of information about the birth experiences of this group of women (selected for the fact that they were also writers), coupled with a comparative paucity of writing produced by them which directly reflects their childbirth experience. The text archive is not yet complete; nor it is yet equipped with delivery software which will allow us to open it to potential users. (Currently, publication date is envisaged for the year 2003.) Meanwhile we hope that this survey will go some way towards demonstrating the rich and varied potential of the tools which are still under construction.

1. This paper was given, in a shorter version entitled "Childbirth Encoded: Women give birth and write about it," at the British Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers conference, Lawrence, Kansas, 16 March 2001.

2. This question as related to a later period has been addressed by Cynthia Huff in "Delivery: The Cultural Representation of Childbirth", Prose Studies (September 1991) 108-121.

3. "Me and Thee", London Review of Books (22 February 2001), 18.

4. Ironically, one of those listed as childless is Joanna Southcott, who died after a spectacular false pregnancy - with divine issue, she said - and whose body was kept unburied for days by her followers while they still waited for the miraculous baby to appear.

5. Rowson wrote, "my pupils become to me as my children," so presumably that was true, too, of her husband's son (Dorothy Weil, In Defense of Women: Susanna Rowson (1762-1824), University Park and London: Pennsylvania University Press, 1976, 26).

6. Adam Hamilton, Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses . . . (Edinburgh: Sands and Co.), 1904, 1906, 1: 130, 2: 7.

7. Mary Martha Sherwood, who bore eight children who survived long enough to be christened (another, an Evangelical, way of deciding how many to count) and who lost an unconscionable number of them to disease in India, also adopted there an equally short-lived orphan.

8. Autobiography (Durham: Surtees Society no. LXII, 1875) 84, 95, 98.

9. Mary Rich, Lady Warwick, who felt that two children were enough, had been the twelfth surviving sibling in her own family.

10. Ann Taylor Gilbert, Autobiography and Other Memorials, ed Josiah Gilbert, 1874, 44.

11. She and her husband were also taking three children from an orphanage with them to the Antipodes.

12. Michael Peterman, Susanna Moodie: A Life (Toronto: ECW Press, 1999), 58.

13. Amanda Foreman, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (London: HarperCollins, 1998), passim.

14. The Christian Reformer, or Unitarian Magazine and Review, xi, 1844, 158-9.

15. The early sixteenth-century Frances, Lady Abergavenny, in one of her original prayers printed in the "Fift Lampe" of Thomas Bentley's Monument of Matrones, 1582; Gilbert, Autobiography, 290.

16. The Orlando Project, "Can a Team Tag Consistently?" forthcoming in Markup Languages.

17. Germaine Greer, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone and Susan Hastings, eds., Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse (1988), 158-61.

18. One might compare the real-life experience of Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, in the earlier seventeenth century. During one of her eleven or more pregnancies she had a bad fall while jumping her horse, and was "taken up for dead though both she and the child did well." (Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, Mariam, 1613: repr. in Renaissance Women: the plays of Elizabeth Cary; the poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Diane Purkiss, London: William Pickering, 1994, 194). In her case it was her husband, not herself, who was keen on her riding, and after this incident she was glad to give it up.

19. Ann Grant, Memoirs and Correspondence of Mrs Grant of Laggan, ed. J. P. Grant, 1844, 1: 222.

20. We do not know whether her being "too ill to read" on 5 January 1815, had anything to do with this delivery on 22 February. The baby, after probably less than seven months gestation, was not expected to live, but did live for twelve days. (Mary Shelley, Journals, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP 1987, 59, 65, 67).

21. Reference currently untraced.

22. Montagu, Complete Letters, ed. Robert Halsband, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-7, 1: 173, 176, 2: 492; Mary Hyde, The Thrales of Streatham Park, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977, 35.

23. Hyde, Streatham Park, 22, 37-8, 48, 176, 203; William McCarthy, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 26.

24. Isobel Grundy, "Sarah Stone: Enlightenment Midwife", Roy Porter, ed., Clio Medica: Medicine in the Enlightenment (Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine: Rodopi Press, 1995), 128-44: 232-4, 235, 237

25. Stone, though, often specifies the trade of the husband (and sometimes the woman in labour: these include weaver, washerwoman, and schoolmistress).

26. Thornton, Autobiography, 123.

27. Raymond A. Anselment, "Elizabeth Freke's Remembrances: Reconstructing a Self", Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 16:1, Spring 1997, 60-1; Freke, Diary, 1671 to 1714, ed. Mary Carbery (Cork: Guy and Co.), 1913, 25. Freke's diary is forthcoming in a new edition from Cambridge University Press, edited by Raymond A. Anselment.

28. Haywood, Fantomina, 1725, Behn, Oroonoko, 1689, Haywood, The Mercenary Lover: or The Unfortunate Heiresses, 1726.

29. It may have been her first novel: she published it and The History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honourable Caroline Stretton in the same year, 1764. This passage is Francis Clive, 5-7, 9-14.

30. Gibbes imagines the mind of the pregnant girl in a manner quite foreign to the matter-of-factness of Ann Gomersall, who writes of working people in general around Leeds: "not above one wedding in ten that the bride was not in a state of pregnancy before the arrival of the wedding day" (Eleonora (London: The Logographic Press, 1789), 1: 258).

31. As befits a woman of reformist ideas, she thus outgoes both Richardson's Pamela (who injures herself attempting to escape over a wall) and Charlotte Lennox's Arabella, who has to be rescued after she attempts to swim the Thames - though neither of them is pregnant.

32. She is, however, sorry that the baby, not being a boy, can't become a Lord, which she apparently feels to be the expected outcome of illicit birth.

33. Croker, The Question: Who Is Anna? (London: J. Souter, 1818), 1: 261. When Anna finally tracks her mother down, the Marchioness is fussing about having a daughter presented at Court: her eldest daughter, she says. "'Your eldest daughter, Madam,' returned Anna, 'will never receive such an honour'" (2: 147).

34. Bonnie Blackwell, "The Irish Recluse; Or, Breakfast at the Rotunda: Recovering and Interpreting a Lost Text through Interdisciplinary Study," British Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers conference, 16 March 2001.

35. Wilson, Clara Gazul (London: Stockdale, 1830), preface. She presumably had no inkling of the issues truly involved in accoucheurs' washing or not washing of their hands, for medical science had not yet arrived at that knowledge.

36. Scenes like this open, for instance, Alethea Lewis's Rhoda, 1815.

37. The second edition de-particularises to "17--".

38. Johnstone, Clan-Albin (2nd ed., London: Longman, 1815), 1: 1, 4-5, 13-14, 17, 21.

39. Mary Collyer, Felicia to Charlotte (London: Robinson and Collyer, 2nd ed., 1749).

40. Elizabeth Boyd, The Humorous Miscellany; or, Riddles for the Beaux, 1733, 18.

41. Variety. A Poem, 1726, 23, 73-4, 82.