The pregnancy question and the novel: detection and concealment from Richardson to Hardy

Abstract

This book is a study of covert representations of pregnancy and birth in canonical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. The research draws on medical texts to illuminate the ways that novelists simultaneously hide and reveal problematic pregnancies and births. Grounded in narrative theory and historicism, it reveals a reciprocal influence between literature and science through the novels of Samuel Richardson, the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens and Hardy. This project is an act of literary detective work that will uncover what can easily be missed by twenty-first century readers, bringing it into light by reconstructing historical knowledge of reproductive medicine