12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Medical tag
Childbirth Maternal
Pregnancy, childbirth, puerperal fever, maternal death, infant mortality.
Works
Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance service of the Italian army, tells the story of his war and his love in plain, retrospective first-person prose. In 1915-16 his unit is quartered in Gorizia, near the Isonzo front.
A Modest Proposal is Swift's savage 1729 pamphlet on Irish poverty under British rule, written in the voice of a projector who treats hunger, tenancy, children, and mothers as items in a national account. The speaker begins with beggars and starving children in Dublin streets, then adopts the language of calculation: numbers of infants, costs of nursing, market value, culinary uses, and benefits to landlords.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in about six weeks in the autumn of 1791, and Joseph Johnson published it in London early in 1792. Two years earlier she had answered Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France with A Vindication of the Rights of Men.
Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, published at Oxford by the Clarendon Press in four volumes between 1765 and 1769, grew out of the lectures he gave at Oxford from 1753 and as first Vinerian Professor from 1758. It was the first full account of English law written for educated readers rather than for practising lawyers, arranged as a reasoned system instead of a collection of cases.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's arrangement of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest group of Irish heroic tales, told in the English of the Kiltartan countryside in County Galway, with its Irish turns of phrase such as 'it is what he said'. Working from medieval Irish texts and the editions and translations of nineteenth-century scholars, she joined the separate tales into a single life of the hero Cuchulain, leaving out what she thought her readers would not care for and adding little of her own.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Evangelium Vitae is John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the dignity and inviolability of human life. It opens with biblical meditation, especially the story of Cain and Abel, and then develops a moral analysis of what the pope calls threats to life in modern law, medicine, family life, and political culture.
Fahrenheit 451 is set in an American city of an unspecified future where houses are fireproof and firemen no longer put out fires but start them, burning books and the houses of people who hide them. Guy Montag, a fireman of ten years, loves the work.
Gabriel Oak, a young shepherd farming his own small flock on Norcombe Hill, falls in love with Bathsheba Everdene, a proud, lively girl staying with her aunt nearby. She saves his life when he nearly suffocates in his smoky hut, but refuses his plain proposal, saying she wants somebody to tame her.
Faust, Part One opens with three frames: a verse Dedication, a Prelude at the Theatre in which a Manager, a Poet and a comic actor argue about what a play should be, and a Prologue in Heaven modelled on the Book of Job. There Mephistopheles mocks mankind, and the Lord permits him to tempt Doctor Faust, saying that man errs as long as he strives but that a good man keeps an instinct of the right way.
Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric appeared in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, 'John of silence', the same day as Repetition. Its subject is Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering.
Gargantua and Pantagruel is the collective title of five comic books about a dynasty of giants, written by François Rabelais and published between 1532 and 1564. Pantagruel appeared first, at Lyon in 1532, under the anagram pen-name Alcofribas Nasier; Gargantua, about the father, followed in 1534 or 1535 and is now printed as Book I. The Third Book (1546) and the Fourth Book (complete 1552) bore Rabelais's own name, and a Fifth Book was published in 1564, eleven years after his death; how much of it he wrote is disputed.
Germ Theory Papers gathers four scientific papers that the Harvard Classics printed together in 1910, in the volume of Scientific Papers that also contains Harvey: one by the Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister and three by the French chemist Louis Pasteur. Each comes with the series' brief introductory note on its author.
The first two books of Procopius's History of the Wars tell the long contest between the Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, and Sasanian Persia, from the early fifth century to 549. Procopius opens by declaring that he writes so that great deeds will not be lost, that he was an eyewitness as adviser to Belisarius, and that truth alone suits history.
Household Stories is Lucy Crane's English translation of fifty-two tales chosen from the Brothers Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen, first published in London by Macmillan in 1882 with pictures by her brother Walter Crane; the library text follows a later reprint and omits the illustrations. The selection mixes the most famous wonder tales with comic stories, animal fables and short nursery pieces.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is Harriet Jacobs's account of her life in slavery and escape, told under the name Linda Brent with the names of people and places changed. Linda grows up in a North Carolina town believing herself free until, at six, her mother dies and she learns she is a slave.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
This volume collects three of Aristophanes' comedies (contents vary by edition; a long-standing selection is The Acharnians, The Clouds and Lysistrata). The Acharnians (425 BCE), the earliest surviving comedy, is set in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
No Exit and Three Other Plays is an American collection of four of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays from the years of the German occupation and just after it, in which his philosophy of freedom and responsibility is worked out on the stage. Stuart Gilbert translated No Exit and The Flies, and Lionel Abel translated Dirty Hands and The Respectful Prostitute.
Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, follows an orphan from a workhouse cradle to a safe home, passing on the way through the criminal underworld of 1830s London. Oliver is born in a workhouse in an unnamed town; his mother dies within minutes, leaving only a locket and a ring that later prove who she was.
On the Making of Man is Gregory of Nyssa's theological anthropology, written as an extended reflection on Genesis and the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Gregory combines scriptural exegesis, Platonizing philosophy, and late antique physiology to ask why humanity is embodied, rational, sexual, mortal, and capable of divine likeness.
Orlando is a comic, fantastical biography of an English nobleman and poet who lives from the last years of Elizabeth I to the eleventh of October 1928, ageing only about twenty years and becoming a woman along the way. The book opens with the sixteen-year-old Orlando slashing at a Moor's head in the attic of his family's enormous house in the country.
Our Town presents Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, through three acts named Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity. The Stage Manager introduces streets, families, dates, statistics, church steeples, milk deliveries, schoolbooks, and weather with almost no scenery, making the ordinary visible by stripping theater to gesture, voice, and memory.
Philosophy of Natural Science is a short introductory textbook by the German-American philosopher Carl G. Hempel, published in 1966 by Prentice-Hall in its Foundations of Philosophy series. It is still under copyright, so the library holds no text; this record describes the book in its own words and quotes only two short sentences.
Richard III follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV, from his first soliloquy to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Wars of the Roses are over and peace has come, but Richard, born misshapen and unfit for courtship, tells the audience he has determined to prove a villain and win the crown.
Ruth is Gaskell's novel about a 'fallen woman', written to challenge the Victorian assumption that an unmarried mother and her child were beyond redemption. Ruth Hilton is a beautiful, innocent orphan of fifteen, apprenticed to a dressmaker, Mrs Mason, in a country town, where she works long hours in a cold workroom.
Sarah, Plain and Tall is a short chapter book narrated by Anna Witting, who lives on a prairie farm in the late nineteenth century with her father, Jacob, and her little brother, Caleb. Their mother died the day after Caleb was born, and since then Papa has stopped singing.
Structural Anthropology (Anthropologie structurale) is a collection of seventeen essays by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, published by Plon in Paris in 1958 and translated into English by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf for Basic Books in 1963. In his preface Lévi-Strauss explains that he chose them from roughly a hundred papers written over some thirty years; most had appeared in journals between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, and two were printed for the first time in the book.
The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Book of Enoch, usually called 1 Enoch, is a collection of five Jewish apocalyptic books gathered under the name of Enoch, the patriarch of Genesis 5 who walked with God and was not, for God took him. Written in stages during the Second Temple period, it presents Enoch as a righteous scribe who is shown the secrets of heaven, earth and the coming judgment and writes them down for his son Methuselah and for a remote generation.
The Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) is Ibn Sina's encyclopedia of medicine in five books, and Book I, the subject of this record, sets out the general principles on which the rest depends. It opens with a definition: medicine is the science of the states of the human body in health and when not in health, and of how health is lost and restored, with a theoretical part that gives knowledge and a practical part that guides the physician's judgment.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
Tristram Shandy promises to tell the life and opinions of its narrator, a Yorkshire gentleman, and spends most of its nine volumes failing to reach his life at all. Tristram begins with the moment of his conception in March 1718, when his mother interrupts his father at the critical instant to ask whether he has remembered to wind up the clock.
The Mabinogion is the name given to eleven medieval Welsh prose tales, preserved mainly in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, together with the Tale of Taliesin, which Lady Charlotte Guest added from a later source. The library text is Guest's translation in the one-volume form, with her introduction and a few of her notes; it follows her order, opening with the three Arthurian romances.
The Poetic Edda is the collection of anonymous Old Norse poems about the gods and heroes of the North, preserved chiefly in the Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius, written about 1270. The library text is the complete translation by Henry Adams Bellows, published in 1923 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which renders thirty-five poems in alliterative verse and adds a general introduction, an introductory note to each poem and extensive notes.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Sign of the Beaver takes place in the Maine woods in 1768. Matt Hallowell, twelve years old and about to turn thirteen, has helped his father clear land and build a log cabin on a new claim.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Waste Land is a poem of 433 lines in five parts, dedicated to Ezra Pound and prefaced by a Latin and Greek epigraph from Petronius in which the Sibyl of Cumae, shrivelled in a jar, says she wants to die. Part I, The Burial of the Dead, opens with April as the cruellest month, stirring memory and desire in a dead land.
To the Lighthouse, published by the Hogarth Press in May 1927, follows the Ramsay family and their guests at a holiday house on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides, across one evening before the First World War and one morning ten years later. Virginia Woolf tells it almost entirely through the passing thoughts of her characters, so that small events, a remark about the weather, a dinner, a brushstroke, carry the weight of a lifetime.
War and Peace follows several Russian noble families from 1805 to 1820, through the wars against Napoleon and the French invasion of 1812. It opens at a St. Petersburg soirée given by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in July 1805, where talk of Bonaparte mixes with gossip about inheritances.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr. Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, becomes curious about his landlord Heathcliff and the strange household at Wuthering Heights.
Passages
- 12 Years a Slave, Patsey chapters
Patsey's sexual exploitation and whipping expose gendered torture and reproductive vulnerability under slavery.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book V, Chapter XLI
Catherine's long labour with gas, the doctor's advice to perform a Caesarean, the stillborn son, the repeated haemorrhages and her death.
- A Modest Proposal, Rejected remedies
A Modest Proposal gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes starvation, infant mortality, public health, reproductive exploitation, and the dehumanizing language of population management
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 9
Women as physicians, nurses and midwives, and the replacement of the midwife by the accoucheur.
- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, ch. 1
Personal security defined to include health; life protected from the time an infant can stir in the womb; harms to health and limbs as injuries to the person.
- Confessions, Book I
Born 'in a very weakly and infirm state'; his mother's death after childbirth; his aunt's care; the spanking at Bossey and its lasting effect on his sexuality.
- Confessions, Book VII
Thérèse's confinements with the midwife and the deposit of the children at the Foundling Hospital.
- Cuchulain of Muirthemne, The War for the Bull of Cuailgne (Macha's curse)
Macha, forced to race while pregnant, gives birth at the goal and lays on the men of Ulster a weakness like that of childbirth in their hour of need.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 1
David's birth attended by the mild Mr Chillip; Aunt Betsey's interrogation of the doctor.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 9
David learns of his mother's death and that of her newborn baby.
- East of Eden, Part Two
Samuel Hamilton and Lee deliver Cathy's twins; Cathy shoots Adam and leaves.
- Evangelium Vitae, Medicine and law
Evangelium Vitae gives this tag concrete force through this is one of the batch's most explicit medical-ethics texts, addressing abortion, euthanasia, suffering, conscience, and care for the vulnerable
- Fahrenheit 451, Part Two, the evening with Mildred's friends
Mrs. Bowles describes having her children by Caesarean section and leaving them to the parlor walls; Mrs. Phelps weeps at Dover Beach.
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. II, Chs. IX–XI
Fanny's struggle along the Casterbridge highway to the Union-house, and the report of her death there.
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. II, Ch. XIII
Bathsheba opens the coffin and finds Fanny with her dead child beside her.
- Faust, Part One, Scene XXV, Dungeon
Gretchen, awaiting execution, speaks in broken, wandering verse of her drowned infant and dead mother and does not at first know Faust.
- Fear and Trembling, Tuning Up (Exordium/Attunement)
Four retellings of the journey to Moriah, each followed by an image of a mother weaning her child by blackening her breast.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book I, Chapters IV-VI
Gargamelle's feast of tripe, the labour, the attentions of the midwives and Gargantua's comic birth through her left ear.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book II, Chapters II-III
Badebec dies in giving birth to Pantagruel, and Gargantua is torn between grief for his wife and joy at his son.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), On the Extension of the Germ Theory (1880), section III
Observations of women with puerperal fever at the Lariboisière and recommendations for boric acid compresses after confinement.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 22
Physicians open the swellings of the dead; failed prognoses; mixed results of bathing and treatment; death of pregnant women; suppuration as a sign of recovery; sequelae in survivors.
- Household Stories (Grimm's Fairy Tales), Rapunzel
The expectant mother pines and grows pale with longing for rampion; later the prince loses his sight among thorns and recovers it when Rapunzel's tears touch his eyes.
- Household Stories (Grimm's Fairy Tales), Snow-white
The queen dies when Snow-white is born; the stepmother tries poisoned laces, a poisoned comb and a half-poisoned apple.
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapter XXVIII, Aunt Nancy
Her aunt's broken health from night nursing on the floor of the entry, and the deaths of her infants.
- Jewish Antiquities, Books 3-4, Mosaic legislation
Josephus summarizes laws about purity, childbirth, skin disease, bodily emissions and priestly inspection, translating ritual categories for Greek readers.
- Little Women, Part Two, Ch. 28
Meg's twins and her struggle with new motherhood.
- Lysistrata and Other Plays, Lysistrata, middle scenes
Women's excuses to leave the Acropolis, including a feigned imminent childbirth.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 8
Macduff reveals he was untimely ripped from his mother's womb.
- Medea and Other Plays, Medea, first monody and speeches
Medea speaks of women’s risks in marriage, childbirth and dependence on husbands.
- My Ántonia, Book IV
Ántonia, abandoned by Larry Donovan, gives birth alone at home.
- No Exit and Three Other Plays, No Exit
Estelle's confession of the birth of her child in Switzerland, its drowning from a balcony, and her lover's suicide.
- Oliver Twist, Chapter I
Oliver's birth in the workhouse, attended by a contract parish surgeon and a pauper nurse; his unnamed mother dies soon after holding him.
- On the Making of Man, Sex, death, and resurrection
On the Making of Man gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens includes anatomy, generation, bodily organs, sex difference, mortality, resurrection, and the porous border between medicine and theology
- Orlando: A Biography, Chapter 6
The midwife Mrs Banting announces the safe delivery of Orlando's son, in a passage the narrator hurries past.
- Our Town, Love and Marriage
Our Town gives this tag concrete force through the medical material is quiet but important: doc gibbs, childbirth, mortality statistics, grief, and the care rituals surrounding death
- Philosophy of Natural Science, Ch. 2
Semmelweis rejects epidemic influences, overcrowding, rough examination, the priest's bell and delivery position as causes of the excess mortality in the First Division.
- Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1
Richard's opening soliloquy describes his deformity and premature birth; Hastings reports that the king is sickly and his physicians fear for him.
- Richard III, Act 4, Scene 1; Act 4, Scene 4
Anne says Richard's timorous dreams kept waking her; the Duchess of York recalls his birth and infancy as a grievous burden.
- Ruth, Ch. 14–15
Ruth's confinement and the birth of Leonard in the Bensons' house.
- Sarah, Plain and Tall, Chapter 1
Anna recalls her mother's death the morning after Caleb was born and the quiet that followed; Caleb asks whether Mama sang.
- Structural Anthropology, Magic and Religion, The Effectiveness of Symbols
The Cuna song for a difficult childbirth and its comparison with psychoanalytic cure.
- The Bible, Genesis 35:16–20
Rachel dies in hard labour giving birth to Benjamin.
- The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch), Chapters LXVII and LXIX
The waters that heal the body of the kings while punishing the spirit, and the Watcher Kasdeja's teaching of smitings of spirits and of the embryo in the womb.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 3, Thesis 1, paras. 690-733
Care of the newborn, breastfeeding and the wet-nurse, infant disorders including night-terrors, and the emotional regimen of childhood.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Apostles' Creed, articles on birth, death and resurrection
The creed moves through conception, birth, suffering, death, burial and bodily resurrection, offering a compact theology of embodied life.
- The Koran, Sura 2:233
Mothers to nurse their children for two full years.
- The Koran, Sura 19:23–26
Mary's labour pains beneath a palm tree; she is told to eat dates and drink from a stream.
- The Koran, Sura 23:12–14
Stages of human creation in the womb.
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Vol. I, Chs. 7, 13 and 18
The village midwife, the marriage settlement and Walter's insistence on sending for a man-midwife.
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Vol. III, Chs. 8–16, and Vol. IV, Ch. 27
Dr. Slop's knotted bag of instruments, the newly invented forceps, and the injury to the infant's nose.
- The Mabinogion, Kilhwch and Olwen, opening
Queen Goleuddydd becomes wild and wanders without a home during her pregnancy; her reason returns as her delivery nears, and she gives birth in fear near a swineherd's herd.
- The Mabinogion, Pwyll Prince of Dyved
Rhiannon's newborn son disappears on the night of his birth while the women watching her sleep, and she is accused of destroying him.
- The Mabinogion, The Story of Lludd and Llevelys
Three plagues afflict Britain; the second, a shriek every May-eve, makes men lose colour and strength, women lose their children, and the young lose their senses; Lludd later keeps himself awake with a vessel of cold water.
- The Poetic Edda, Sigrdrifumol, stanza 8
Sigrdrifa teaches birth-runes, written on the palms and around the joints, to help bring a child from its mother.
- The Portable Faulkner, As I Lay Dying selections
The Bundrens' journey with Addie's corpse centers childbirth, death care, injury, heat, smell and family endurance.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 2-3
Hester's postpartum public punishment makes sexuality, maternity and communal discipline visible on the scaffold.
- The Sign of the Beaver, Chapter 25
The family arrives and explains the delay: all were sick with typhus, and the baby born in Massachusetts has died.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapters XX-XXI
Brynhild teaches help-runes for childbirth and bough-runes for leech-lore and wound-searching, and counsels careful washing and burial of the dead.
- The Waste Land, II. A Game of Chess, ll. 139-172
In the pub, Lil's friend tells of her demobbed husband, her teeth, her five children and the pills taken to bring off a pregnancy.
- To the Lighthouse, Part II, Time Passes
Bracketed reports of Mrs Ramsay's death, Prue's death after childbirth, and Andrew's death by a shell.
- War and Peace, Book Four, Chs. VIII–IX
Lise's labor and death in childbirth at Bald Hills as Andrew returns home.
- Wuthering Heights, Catherine's illness and childbirth
Catherine's emotional crisis becomes feverish illness, delirium, childbirth and death.
Quotes
“LIFE is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual”
“my birth cost my mother her life, and was the first of my misfortunes”
“The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children”
“It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other”
Frequently cited
“Sooner would I stand Three times to face their battles, shield in hand, Than bear one child”
“Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world scarce half made up”
“the movement is for the benefit of the body, and the music is for the benefit of the mind.”