The Pregnancy Question and the Novel: Detection and Concealment from Richardson to Hardy

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 literar...