Recent reading

[luzula]

Giving Birth in 18th Century England by Sarah Fox (2022)
Recced by oursin (thank you!). I read this as fic research. Granted, Alison already had children in my previous poly FotH fic, but she will have them in this one too, and I wanted to find some different angle on it. For my last fic, I got some material from William Smellie’s A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1752). There's a lot of stuff in Fox's book about the social context of giving birth, both in terms of family and of the surrounding community. Interesting to read about the trials for infanticide, where the surrounding community kept tabs on women they suspected, accusing them and bringing evidence - but also sometimes being kind to women in difficult circumstances, for example female servants made pregnant by their masters. Well, that's not relevant for my fic, but there are plenty of other good details I can use.

The Black Mask by E. W. Hornung (1901)
The second collection of Raffles stories. There's a sort of claustrophobic feel to this one due to their changed circumstances. I have to say that I prefer regshoe’s version of what happened after the end of the first book! And I rolled my eyes at Raffles’ female love interests, which were introduced just for the space of one story, and then never mentioned again, while at the same time we were supposed to believe a depth of feeling that was never really earned. But wow, that is certainly...an ending. I wonder where the next book goes after that. And did the author, like ACD, want to stop writing?

Comments

[sylvanwitch]

One of my many tasks as a research asst. in grad school was to read Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette (which I loved doing), and of the many things I learned, the one that stands out to me still is the number of infants and toddlers who had terrible accidents around the hearth and barnyard. How many were genuine tragedies and how many deliberate infanticides is impossible to know, of course, but it did give me a lot to think about.

[luzula]

The infanticides in this book are about infants who were just born, and of course there are also a lot of infants who were stillborn. It seems that in court proceedings they looked at whether a woman had prepared for the arrival of a child, and had gotten clothes for it, etc. The reasoning was that if she had, then she probably hadn't planned to kill it.