By August, she would agree only to bits of cooked apple. For the next two months, she could hold down no more than six, then four, teacups of rice or oatmeal and milk a day. Hunger after a long illness is always a heartening sign, but the miracle of Sarah’s recovered health was soon followed by the mystery of her vanished appetite. A doctor diagnosed her with inflammation of the brain. Her parents moistened her lips with beer, but she couldn’t swallow food or drink. Now she lost consciousness and suffered convulsive fits. The third of seven children born to Evan Jacob, a tenant farmer in Wales’s Carmarthenshire county, and his wife, Hannah, Sarah had always been a healthy, energetic girl, known in her parish for her intelligence and good moral sense. On a February day in 1867, three months before her tenth birthday, Sarah Jacob took to her bed complaining of terrible stomach pain and bloody froth filling her mouth. Donoghue’s novel asks why a child would choose to starve.
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