History Press bags Cox's 'gripping' account of Victorian women's bodies

The History Press has snapped up Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jessica Cox. 

Commissioning editor Amy Rigg acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Laurie Robertson at PFD. Publication is scheduled for June 2023.

The book explores why women’s bodies were a taboo subject for Victorians and seeks to redress the glaring omission of the pregnant and postnatal body from public discourses.

"Drawing on letters, diaries, newspapers, coroner’s reports and hospital archives as well as medical advice, literature and art, Jessica Cox charts the maternal experiences of 19th-century women, exploring fertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, maternal mortality, unwanted pregnancies, infant loss, breastfeeding, and postnatal bodies and minds," the synopsis reads. 

Cox is an academic at Brunel University who teaches and researches 19th-century literature and culture. "I’ve researched and written about the nineteenth century for many years, but became particularly interested in women’s experience of maternity at that time after having my own children," she said.

"I really wanted to foreground the lived experiences of these women, and to share their stories. It’s a part of history that has received little attention to date, but in many ways the period established the grounds for women’s maternal experiences today, and the continuities are as interesting as the divergences. Uncovering the experiences of women two centuries ago has been fascinating, and it’s been a pleasure to work with both The History Press and my agent at PFD on this project. I hope I’ve done it justice."

Rigg said: "Jessica Cox’s gripping book presents a vast selection of women’s experiences, from royalty to the inhabitants of Britain’s many workhouses, vividly and viscerally documenting their journeys through pregnancy and onto the challenges of post-natal life.

"This important book explains how Victorian ideas about motherhood still affect our ideas in the present, and shines a light on a largely hidden world, all too frequently one of pain, stigma and hardship, to reveal what motherhood was truly like for the women of nineteenth-century Britain."