In Fasting Girls (1998), the historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg describes how medieval women saw fasting as a demonstration of holiness: they were ‘preoccupied by noneating because food practices provided a basic way to express religious ideals of suffering and service to their fellow creatures.’ In the nineteenth century, the epithet ‘fasting girl’ is transferred to the hysteric, moving from an expression of religious piety to a gendered and often sexualised pathology. Based on the almost fifty cases of ‘fasting girls’ – of women who claimed to be surviving without food for months on end in Europe and North America between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries – Donoghue’s novel anticipates the invention of anorexia as a clinical pathology in the late nineteenth century, and as a cultural pathology in the twentieth. Set in Ireland in 1858, seven years after the potato famine, The Wonder tells the story of an English nurse who is hired to spend two weeks observing an eleven-year old girl, who, her parents claim, has not eaten for months. I spoke to Donoghue about the second of these novels, her 2016 book, The Wonder. Since then, Donoghue has gone on to write a further three novels for adults as well as a YA fiction series. Room became an Oscar-winning film and gained an Academy Award nomination for its script.

She went on to write the screenplay adaptation, also titled Room (2015), directed by Lenny Abraham. Emma Donoghue is an award-winning author, best known as the writer of the novel Room (2010), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker.

The wonder by emma donoghue