From ballads, epitaphs, paintings, tombstones, and diary fragments, Donoghue has fashioned a collection of historical tales about what might have happened to women who have piqued her curiosity and fired her imagination. In the title story, after a pregnant woman stuns her husband by pretending to give birth to the rabbit she was preparing for dinner, she is persuaded to take the charade further, go on tour, and see whether she can dupe the public into coming to view her "offspring." Some of these tales feature acts of breathtaking cruelty: in "Revelations," a religious cult leader convinces her followers to fast for 40 days in order to welcome their new messiah properly; and in "Cured," a Victorian gynecologist with a perverse sense of morality performs corrective surgery on his unsuspecting patients. Many of these stories deal with women who nurture deep (and sometimes unspoken) passion for other women, as in "How a Lady Dies," in which a close friend of Frances Sheridan, the noted playwright's wife, allows herself to succumb to illness and death rather than face a life without her true love. Each portrait is so strikingly original and so utterly convincing that readers will be hard pressed to believe the story could have happened any other way. Enthusiastically recommended.