Overview
- The 75-year-old novelist says she chose drug-free deliveries in 1987 and 1990 to better grasp how women experienced childbirth in earlier eras.
- She tells PEOPLE the labors lasted nine and seven hours with severe pain but no complications, and she felt fortunate to have modern medical support available.
- Dunant wrote a detailed account the night after giving birth to preserve each stage of pain, later using it to inform scenes in her fiction.
- Her experience shaped the depiction of childbirth in her 2003 novel The Birth of Venus and feeds into themes in her new Renaissance-set book, The Marchesa.
- She notes the limits of recreating the past—including hospital care and her partner’s presence—and says she would not advise others to refuse pain relief.