THE WOMAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO RABBITS

Seventeen stories by the Irish-born Canadian author (Slammerkin, 2001, etc.) ransack what Donoghue calls “the flotsam and jetsam of the last seven hundred years of British and Irish life” for razor-sharp vignettes of the fates of women in judgmental male-dominated societies.

The volume gets off to a flying start with “The Last Rabbit,” in which a duplicitous “man-midwife” persuades a poor countrywoman to claim she has experienced a miraculous birthing. It’s a tale inspired by a famous Hogarth engraving—as Donoghue explains in the first of the “Note(s)” (acknowledging sources) that follow each story. Next up is the nicely titled “Acts of Union,” about a drunken English soldier serving in Ireland who’s hoodwinked into marrying a wily apothecary’s spinster niece. You’ll think of Boccaccio and Chaucer (as well as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood) as Donoghue ranges among the lives of eminent figures, focusing, for example, on asexual art historian John Ruskin’s ludicrous nuptial night (“Come, gentle Night”); feminist intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft’s failed career as governess (“Words for Things”); and the infuriating Elmer Gantry–like hypocrite, apocalyptic preacher Elspeth “Luckie” Buchan (“Revelations”). Equally telling are stories of the obscure: the smallest surviving baby ever heard of, exhibited as a freak of nature (“A Short Story”); a plucky victim of the barbarous practice of clitoridectomy, undertaken to combat “the disease of self-irritation” (“Cured”); two learned ladies who live in scholarly seclusion on the Norfolk coast, pausing from their mental exertions to rescue drowning sailors (“Salvage”); and, in the remarkable “The Necessity of Burning,” invincibly ignorant Margery Starre, an illiterate beldame to turns lustily to book-burning during the 14th-century Peasants’ Revolt against the intellectual tyranny of Cambridge University. These jewel-like stories vibrate with thickly textured detail and vigorous period language. Donoghue’s colorful, confrontational historically based fiction is making something entirely new and captivating out of gender issues.

One of the best books of the year thus far. Like Andrea Barrett, Donoghue has staked a claim to her own distinctive fictional territory.