Emma Donoghue
Fun with Emma Donoghue
From Emma's webpage:
If you had a time machine, where would you go?
Late eighteenth-century London, England. I'd be a rich spinster of scandalous habits, my hats would be enormous, chocolate drops would have been recently invented, and there'd be revolutions to provide a little excitement.
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Did you know?
Emma was born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, and is the youngest of eight children.
Discussion Questions
1. During the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, many people referred to the 1918 Spanish flu as a touchpoint. What was your awareness of the 1918 flu before the 2020 pandemic? How important is an understanding of history when we deal with similar crises in the present?
2. Julia and the other health workers face many challenges, including lack of supplies, misinformation, and sexism. Which of those challenges were unique to Julia’s time and place? To what extent do our health-care workers face the same challenges today?
3. Throughout The Pull of the Stars, Julia notices government placards with public health warnings and advice. Why do you think Emma Donoghue included them in the novel? Were your government’s efforts to communicate with the general public during the coronavirus pandemic similar to those in the novel, or different?
4. War in several senses–the First World War in which Tim Power served, and the Irish revolutionary struggle in which Dr. Lynn is a leader–is the context to The Pull of Stars. What effect do these distant conflicts have on the story and atmosphere of the novel? Why is war kept mostly in the background rather than in the foreground?
5. Julia argues that women pay “the blood tax” just as much as soldiers. What did you think about the detailed scenes that depicted childbirth and its complications? How do you think birth functions as a source of plot compared with the flu?
6. In the novel, the expectant mothers have very different family situations and relations and relationships with their children. Which patient did you identify with the most? Which patient’s story was the most surprising to you?
7. How does status of “immunity” function in the novel?
8. What does Bridie Sweeney bring into Julia’s life? Into the novel as a whole?
9. What effect does the slow of revelation of her background have on your sense of other characters, institutions, and Ireland’s history?
10. How does it change your response to a character in a novel such as Kathleen Lynn when you learn that she was a historical figure? What does an author owe to a real person when fictionalizing them?
Santa Monica Public Library
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The Pull of the Stars by ISBN: 9780316499033Publication Date: 2021-07-06Set in 1918 Dublin, in an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders--Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.
Read A-Likes
The Winter Soldier by ISBN: 9780316477604Publication Date: 2018-09-11Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives, at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single, mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains.As the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever.
Year of Wonders by ISBN: 9780142001431Publication Date: 2002-04-30An unforgettable tale, set in 17th century England, of a village that quarantines itself to arrest the spread of the plague. When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."
Fever by ISBN: 9781451693423Publication Date: 2014-03-18On the eve of the twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up the domestic-service ladder. She worked her way to the kitchen, and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef. Sought after by New York aristocracy she seemed to have achieved the life she'd aimed for when she arrived in Castle Garden. Then one determined "medical engineer" noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked, and identified her as an "asymptomatic carrier" of Typhoid Fever. The Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother Island, where she was kept in isolation from 1907 to 1910, then released under the condition that she never work as a cook again. Yet for Mary, the alternatives were abhorrent. She defied the edict. Bringing early-twentieth-century New York alive--the neighborhoods, the bars, the park carved out of upper Manhattan, the boat traffic, the mansions and sweatshops and emerging skyscrapers--Fever is an ambitious retelling of a forgotten life.
