The Pregnancy Question and the Novel

This open-access book considers the depiction of pregnancy and birth in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. It explores the ways that novelists – and characters – simultaneously hide and reveal what is happening inside the female body. The Pregnancy Question reconstructs the knowledge of reproductive medicine that operated on readers and writers during these periods. Because it uncovers what can easily be missed in these representations, this study can be viewed as an act of literary detective work. Through close readings of concealed pregnancy in the novels of Richardson, the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens and Hardy, Tracy Brain highlights the reciprocal influence between literature and science. She asks why these portrayals and the challenges they pose continue to matter in the twenty-first century, and why concealed pregnancy and its aftermath is yet to be consigned to distant history and centuries-old fiction.