In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel, Livia Arnal Woods investigates the modest, relatively unexplored representation of pregnancy in Victorian novels written by both female and male authors. Drawing on her critical practice of somatic reading to capture the fictional representations of women’s reproductive bodies on the page, Woods examines pregnancy as a physiological condition. She shows that this condition has been largely elided from Victorian narratives and instead shaped by patriarchal medical discourse, social norms, and cultural constructions in nineteenth-century Britain. Woods’s selected corpus of analysis encompasses novels with plots or subplots about unmarried expectant mothers who do not comply with prevailing moral standards. It also includes works about pregnant wives who obey the ideology of “sentimental motherhood,” which stressed that bearing and raising children within marriage is women’s only destiny and spiritual vocation. Indeed, in her discussion of antagonistic artistic paradigms of pregnancy during the nineteenth century, Woods contends that there are “Victorian literary tendencies to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters go undescribed” (22).

In chapter 1, “Judgment,” the author looks at novels that enforce Victorian readers’ moralizing judgments about the (un)pregnant bodies of middle-class and upper-class wives. In Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (1865), Lady Glencora Palliser’s seemingly infertile body becomes a site of harsh scrutiny directed toward her female “unfitness” until she carries and delivers a baby. Thanks to the characters of Catherine and Frances Earnshaw, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) reveals how the sacred family institution conceals and confines pregnancy to “home, sweet home,” while recognizing the high rate of maternal mortality at childbirth in the Victorian era. The latter is also dramatized in Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Clever Woman of the Family (1865), where death is the punishment for the immodest wife. In chapter 2, “Sympathy,” Woods examines the dynamic between compassion and social condemnation to portray fallen women, as the mothers of illegitimate children were called, as reflected in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) and in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). Woods argues that the explicitness of pregnancy as a physical condition in both mid-Victorian novels represents the failure of their working-class female protagonists to uphold compulsory rules of sexual modesty and propriety. The book’s interlude, titled “Sensation,” analyzes the great physicality, the use of language of bodily compulsion, and the somatic potential of sensation fiction from the 1860s, like Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1860), which narrates the chronology of Lady Isabel Vane’s four pregnancies and her subsequent postpartum recoveries, including her guilt and emotional pain caused by the threat of miscarriage, in combination with her tumultuous married life.

In chapter 3, “Diagnosis,” Woods critically reviews Britain’s nineteenth-century medical interventionism and the role of male doctors in women’s reproductive health. She details how the medical diagnosis of pregnancy, undertaken by male practitioners, not only makes this physical condition visible in Victorian novels, but also constitutes the assertion of a repressive moral authority over women’s reproductive bodies. With that purpose, Woods explores a married couple in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871): Rosamond and Tertius Lydgate. Rosamond’s misbehavior causes a severe consequence: a miscarriage. Meanwhile, her husband-doctor chronicles, supervises, and gives his medical opinion about Rosamond’s pregnancy, while struggling to maintain marital happiness and achieve the social status warranted by his profession. Furthermore, in her discussion of Middlemarch, Woods details how, in opposition to Rosamond, her fellow countrywoman Celia Chettam, depicted as a dutiful wife, enjoys a peaceful, yet narratively invisible, pregnancy.

In chapter 4, “Impression,” the author mobilizes theories on maternal impression to review four novels about pregnancy published in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century: Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), Victoria Cross’s Anna Lombard (1902), and Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901). Woods convincingly demonstrates that in the last years of the Victorian era there are more textual representations of pregnancy, first emphasizing the expectant mother’s body and the perceived immodesty of her physical state, and later increasingly highlighting women’s unstable psychological states, anxieties about the future, and, notably, the idea of paternal impressions. In Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, Edith Beale’s reproductive body is damaged and eventually killed by the consequence of her husband’s immorality: syphilis. In Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, a father’s belief in ill-fated human reproduction is replicated by his murderous child, who bears no resemblance to his biological mother. In Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady, Katherine’s pregnancy is doomed by her husband’s accident and subsequent physical impairment, which causes her to suffer from emotional distress that ultimately maims her child, who is born without legs. Woods contends that Cross’s Anna Lombard reflects a “degenerative vision of reproduction” and “lack of conscious bodily agency,” because in colonial India, when an English woman reluctantly expects to deliver a mixed-race child by her dead Indian first husband, she feels degraded and is driven to commit infanticide to avoid a “‘dark’ miscegenated future” (151, 155).

Both Woods’s conclusion and the book overall aptly intertwine the examination of novels about pregnancy in nineteenth-century Britain with astonishing analogies and parallel situations of expectant mothers in the twenty-first-century United States, including her own experience with maternity, the harrowing threat of miscarriage, the ongoing medicalization of childbearing as an illness, the literary boom of “mommy memoirs,” and the precarity and violence often endured by pregnant women of color, as well as the loss of constitutional protection for women’s reproductive rights after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In short, Woods’s well-researched, highly analytical book is a valuable addition to existing literary studies on pregnancy, because it captures the tensions among women’s reproductive bodies and individual experiences of pregnancy with mainstream discourses of medicine, society, and culture expressed in Victorian novels.