Gittings, Robert. Young Thomas Hardy. Penguin.
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84 results for midwife
Sarah Gardner
The play which aroused such passions has considerable feminist interest. It turns on the desire of the young widow Mrs Holdfast to choose herself a second husband by advertising for candidates. She is lodging at the house of Madame L'Bronze, who has the distinction of being a Frenchwoman sympathetically portrayed. When the widow's confidante and protegée, Lydia Fanlove, suggests a woman hack writer to draw up the advertisement, the widow is charmed, not having known that such women existed. One thread of the play, therefore, is the experience of the female hack, Mrs Epigram, who lives with tattered clothes and inky fingers in a shabby, paper-strewn garret, but who is a woman of principle and idealism. Connected with her are her slave-driving publisher, Snap (who sees lines of verse strictly as product), and a cheery, rough-spoken sailor, her cousin, Jack Steerage, who sees through gender and class stereotypes to judge by the heart. Another thread is the progress of selection among the widow's suitors, who include an Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman. The pallidly-sketched young Englishman, George Wydham (the name was altered from Wyndham, to avoid reference to actual persons) acts purely at his father's command, does not want to marry the widow at all, and has a lost love, who turns out in the end to be Lydia. A miserly Scotsman, McLocust, contrasts with a handsome, emotional, generous young Irishman, Lieutenant Carrol O'Cannon (often called Little O'Cannon), who is happily free from English class or gender rigidity. A third, loosely-attached thread concerns a highly successful and fashionable man midwife, Dr Obstetric, who desires to act as voyeur when the widow interviews her marital candidates.
Thomas Hardy
It was a difficult labour. The mother nearly died, and the baby was dumped in a basket and ignored until the midwife exclaimed, Stop a minute: he's alive sure enough! Thomas had a sister, Mary, born the following year (to whom he was very close), and a sister and brother a good deal younger.
Brilliana, Lady Harley
says nothing very explicit about her child-bearing in letters to her husband, but about a month before the birth of her second son she wrote, This last night I not being very well, made me send this day for the midwife. This son was later reckoned a troublesome person, and was subject to fits.She later mentioned a miscarriage which severely affected her health.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
The narrator meditates on national ways of death as well as life. The English graveyard, full of monuments to young soldiers and babies, reflects one way; the outlawed custom of suttee or sati or widow-burning reflects another. (The town's name, Satipur, means place of suttee, while the Nawab's realm of Khatm means finished.) The narrator is amazed that contemporary women still defend the practice, although widows lead such respected lives of pleasure and freedom. Only one among the widows, Maji, is different: an ex-midwife, a woman of spirituality, who lives in a tiny hut and can be turned to in any difficulty, such as the death of a destitute beggar-woman.
Christian Isobel Johnstone
Though most of this novel's action takes place in oppressed Ireland, this book opens in Edinburgh, where various characters, including a midwife and Miss Jacobina Pingle, a nervous maiden gentlewoman, talk in dialect. Pingle is a working woman, who in the tenth story or top flat [an architectural feature still unknown in England], exercised the calling of silk glove-mender and stocking- ingrafter. In this novel
spans a range of her styles from satire and comedy to pathos and political indignation. Her Scottish hero, Wolfe Grahame (like the Irish hero of
's later The Ford Family in Ireland), fights in each side successively in the Irish rebellion of 1798, and dies on the scaffold.
Margaret Laurence
's childbirth experiences were not propitious. Her daughter was delivered by forceps (at the
in London, UK) after a 36-hour labour, and the delivery cracked the baby's collar-bone—a not unusual occurrence,
was assured. The bone healed within ten days. Jocelyn lived through a greater danger at two months, when her smallpox and yellow fever injections, for Africa, were administered too close together and in the wrong order. The baby went into convulsions, while the doctor concerned (who was angry with Laurence for insisting on continuing to breast-feed while her daughter was severely ill in hospital) ascribed the convulsions to either a congenital tendency or else meningitis. Two years later another doctor admitted that the first had been at fault. When Laurence got pregnant in Ghana a pregnancy test falsely registered negative, netting her a diagnosis of neurotic, and after that she had two false labours before managing a swift natural childbirth, assisted by a reassuring black midwife. A white nursing sister spoiled the experience slightly by forcing her to eat while in labour although she said she would throw up, which she duly did.
Winifred Maxwell, Countess of Nithsdale
Lady Winifred's mother,
, came from an influential
royalist family. One of her great-grand-mothers was the Renaissance translator
(one of the famous Cook sisters). She herself was an active Catholic, even a Catholic activist in conjunction with the midwife-writer
. Lady Powis (as she then was) was accused of treasonous plotting in the so-called and largely fictitious Meal Tub Plot (about which she composed and had printed at least one and probably two ballads). She was a prisoner in the Tower of London from 4 November 1679 to 12 February 1680, her shorter period of incarceration overlapping with her husband's longer one.
Edna O'Brien
The protagonist, Mary, grows up in rural Ireland and is not unlike Kate of The Country Girls, though her experience is even harsher. Some of the novel's short chapters are presented from her point of view, but these become fewer as the story proceeds, and the chapters—consisting of dialogue and meticulously precise factual observation—get even shorter. Mary is raped by her father, the first time before she is able to formulate in words what has happened, and again after her mother's death from cancer. She tries to escape, first to a convent school, then to various contingent havens in other people's lives. She is brought home. She tries to kill herself. A local woman (herself unhappily childless) agrees to take her to England for an abortion but the authorities intervene and bring them back. There is public shame for Mary, sympathy for her father. He, at last, kills himself; she becomes a pawn at the centre of a legal battle, then the virtual prisoner of a group of fervent anti-abortion activists. When she miscarries, their first reaction to her agony and terror is accusation: May you rot in hell . . . You have murdered it. Mary's voice becomes almost entirely lost as actions and characters multiply: the little people with limitless kindness and generosity; the writers of hate mail; the bigots of every stripe; the fourteen-year-old Molly (a different form of the name Mary) whose lawyer father is one of the arbiters of Mary's fate; the lawyer's wife who has herself had an abortion; the midwife haunted by infant corpses. The last scene, astonishingly, shows Mary with the nightmare behind her, gathering her voice to take the microphone to sing in a night club with Mona, the friend whom she met in an English abortion clinic and who promised her there: We'll go on the razzle-dazzle.
Laetitia Pilkington
's father,
, was the son of a Dutch physician who had settled in Dublin. He himself was a doctor who made his career as a man-midwife or obstetrician, an unusual practice for a medical doctor in eighteenth-century Ireland.
Naomi Royde-Smith
'a most important literary work included serving as midwife to the writings of others. She also published prodigiously, from early in the twentieth century: nearly forty novels, besides short stories, anthologies and compilations, biographies, reviews and criticism, four plays, and books about railways and other forms of transport.
Mary Stott
A number of social advances were initiated on
's page: the
, which helped to provoke
to introduce a national constant attendance allowance, an association for housebound mothers of small children which developed into the
(later the National Women's Register), also the
, the
, and the
. She calls these only the best-known of a whole range of do-it-yourself organizations which have affected legislation, influenced medical and education practices, or just made life a little easier or more enjoyable for some section of the community to which her women's page was midwife.
Harriet Taylor
Her father,
, was a surgeon and male midwife.
says he appears to have been a mean, domineering man.
Ann Thicknesse: Biography
Ann Ford quickly began using the talents God had given me in private performances as a singer: at home, and in other fashionable houses in London and Bath. Her published letter to
includes a remarkable defence of singing in public for a young woman, as not only potentially virtuous and innocent, but a professional activity, to be looked upon in as favourable a light, as a surgeon or midwife. After she broke off her relations with Jersey, her father grudgingly supported, she said, her aim of earning her living by music, but both Jersey and his wife
refused her their patronage.
This Lady Jersey had been, by a former marriage, Duchess of Bedford. It was not she but her daughter-in-law who was notoriously the mistress of the Prince of Wales (later George IV).
Alice Thornton
The nineteenth-century edition of her writings omitted a good deal from her graphic accounts of her experiences in childbirth. One baby was born well nigh choaked with Phleagme & the Nauill string w[hi]ch was twice about her necke, & Arms; another died while actually nursing at her breast. Her fears and sufferings increased rather that diminishing with successive pregnancies. On one occasion a midwife's violent inforcement of the Childe . . . caused a grand dislocation of her back and kidneys; on another she suffered from gangareene of a nipple.
Catharine Parr Traill
looked for various ways to make money to support the family because Thomas was repeatedly denied a government posting, and his mental troubles pushed her into the role of family breadwinner. She was by turns a schoolteacher, a nurse, a midwife, an herbalist, and a farmer.
Sophie Veitch
's elder sister,
(whose name on marriage became Smith), was born on 1 April 1836 at Sopley in Hampshire. After the family returned from Palestine she became successively an early student at
, a nurse, midwife, and social reformer, working to improve the status and training of midwives. She worked with the
in Sedan during the Franco-Prussian war. Like
she was a published author: her Handbook for Nurses for the Sick—which her colleague
termed the best extant nursing handbook—appeared in 1870. She died near London on 8 February 1894.
Ann Wall
When his mistress asked him years later about Ann's injury (caused by a blow from him when she was a toddler), he said it was done by the midwife at her birth.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
She was an only child. According to
(an editor of her letters, to whom she dictated notes in 1966), her birth was marked by what amounted to portents. Her mother went into labour at the sound of a church-bell tolling for the death of a governor of
(where her father taught); she was born with a caul (a membrane which sometimes encloses a baby at birth, subject of many superstitions and folk beliefs); her maternal grandmother's ghost was believed to have visited her cradle.
Being born with a caul was considered lucky—a dried caul supposedly protected against drowning, so they were sold (even into the twentieth century) as talismans for sailors.
's was claimed by the midwife and likely sold to a sailor.
Mehetabel Wright
stayed in London and visited Bath and Tunbridge Wells when young, with her uncle
, a physician and man-midwife. Years later it was said that Uncle Matthew had done a lot for her (possibly of a financial nature).
1739
Sir Richard Manningham, fashionable man-midwife...
, fashionable man-midwife or obstetrician, opened England's first lying-in infirmary or medical centre reserved for childbirth, in a house next-door to his own in Jermyn Street, London.
By March 1800
A midwife named Mrs Wright published An Essay...
A midwife named
published An Essay to instruct women how to protect themselves in a State of Pregnancy, from the Disorders incident to that Period.
1659
T. Chamberlayne, in The Complete Midwifes...
, in The Complete Midwifes Practice Enlarg'd, provided careful instruction to couples as how to conceive male children only.
1767
Man-midwife Sir John Leake assigned cost-free...
Man-midwife
assigned cost-free land in Lambeth, south of the Thames, on which to build to the
, a charity institution.
1609
Louise Bourgeois, a French midwife with feminist...
, a French midwife with feminist views, published her Observations diverses, in which she takes an authoritative tone and seeks to keep the practice of midwifery in female hands.
July 1797
Reviewing Margaret Stephen's Domestic Midwife;...
Reviewing
's Domestic Midwife; or, the best Means of preventing Danger in Child-Birth, 1795, the Critical indulged in one of its periodic pronouncements about the limitations of midwives.