Free Letters to Alice by Fay Weldon

this way she will brood in solitude, ’til at last the mere initiation of labour may be sufficient to excite puerperal convulsions.
    They could bleed, give opium, pour cold water over the head when the fit came on, break the waters, or dilate the birth canal by hand (another common practice) to speed delivery, but that was all. If the baby came quickly enough the mother might live otherwise not.
    I tell you all this so you don’t forget to be thankful that you live now. Doctors then were faced, often enough, with the problem of which to save, the mother or the child. The Church said the baby: the newborn soul must go on, to achieve its chance of redemption: the mother, the older soul, could be left to die and fly, with any luck, to God. But for the most part, it seems, doctors decided where the likelihood of survival lay, and either performed a Caesarean — which inevitably meant the death of the mother, within a day or so — or opened the head of the baby, within the womb, and removed it piecemeal. They were not brutal: they merely did what they could. But it is not surprising that the taste of the female novel-reader, at the time, so often lay in extravagant romance: that they loved wild gothic tales. Every child would be brought up with a knowledge of the closed bedroom door, the hurrying of midwives and doctors, the black bags in which the instruments were carried — the vectis, or the new, safer forceps. ‘There is still a query,’ says my encyclopedia, which seems to be intended to serve as the only text-book a surgeon would have, ‘that if forceps be so much better than the vectis, how is it that the vectis is still in use by some? For no other reason but because it is easier to use: the instrument requires less skill, and for that reason is it preferred by those who have no more skill than they know what to do with.’
    Neither Jane nor Cassandra had children. I am not saying that Jane stayed single because she didn’t want them, and children were where marriage led. I am just saying she was an imaginative person — and just as an imaginative person has more difficulty than others in learning to drive — the mind forever leaps ahead, constructing possible scenarios of death and disaster — so she would have looked ahead into her own life, and not relished the screams, and the pacings, and so forth. Would you have been brave enough, Alice — and why should she be braver than you?
    It is only recently that it has become acceptable for a woman to give voice to her quite rational fears of childbirth. She was supposed to keep quiet and get on with it: and certainly not take steps to avoid childbirth by using contraceptives, abstinence or declining to marry. Queen Victoria, a mother of nine, disgraced herself by grumbling publicly about the pain, and referred to child-bearing as ‘the shadow side of marriage’; and when anesthetics first became available, took chloroform — just a little, soaked into a handkerchief — at the birth of her eighth and ninth child. The country felt rather let down; ‘in sorrow shalt thou bring forth’ was much quoted at her, but fortunately for the rest of us, she refused to be abashed, and the habit caught on. Nowadays, the woman who declines to have children is still regarded with some (though shrinking) curiosity: her motives are not likely to be nearly as strong, her fears not nearly so basic, as those that must have assailed her female forbears. Namely, the expectation of pain and the fear of death.
    But those matters lay ahead for Jane Austen. It was 1790. She was not yet ‘out’. That is to say, she had not yet been put on the marriage market: adorned, taken to balls and parties and exposed to the company of suitable young men, in the hope that she would ‘catch’ one. I am not against such methods of regulating the hearts and lives of young women: it is certainly better that they should fall in love with someone suitable than with someone who, to the older