Nurses, mothers, sisters: Relational resilience and healing vulnerability in Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder and The Pull of the Stars

Abstract

The Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue (born in Dublin in 1969) is known for her award-winning novels, among them the acclaimed Room (2010), together with historical fiction that explores late-Victorian times and lives. In The Wonder (2016), an English nurse is sent to the Irish Midlands in the 1850s – a land rav-aged by famine and poverty – to watch over a fasting girl, Anna O’Donnell, whose parents claim she is living without any food. Trained by Florence Nightingale herself during the Crimean war, Lib is torn between her duty as a hired nurse and her growing concern for the child, leading to consequences that will alter the lives of both. Although still lacking scholarly attention, The Pull of the Stars (2020) shares important elements with the previous novel. Set in 1918, it evokes the havoc caused by the Great Flu and the Great War in Dublin, while it describes three days in a maternity quarantine ward where nurse Julia, Dr. Lynn, and a young volunteer named Bridie struggle to keep their patients alive, at the same time they find it increasingly hard to remain detached from them and from each other.