Mary Toft: or The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer

I read about this either in The New Yorker or The Week, and I remember thinking it sounded very odd, but also very well written, and that I should try it.
Then came the pandemic.  Odd did not seem as appealing, just because we were dealing with a lot of unknowns.  However, my local library has been closed for over two months, and even though I had more than 40 books checked out of the library, now i am down to one, this one, left unread.  In the interest of full disclosure I have taken steps to remedy my reading situation, but I felt obliged to finish what I had out, which has almost literally never happened before.  I have Tsundoku, a syndrome where you have more books than you can read.  I needed for that to be wrong just this once, and so I read.
In this book, the author retells the real-life story of a woman who, in England in 1726, began pretending to give birth to dead, dismembered rabbits. He places this strange narrative within the literary tradition of novels about fakers and cheats.  The beginning is all about the goodness of he doctor, who cannot imagine anyone doing this for attention.  He feels for Mary.  His faith in her does not save her, but we see the dilemma for all involved.  This is a sensitive, vivid, almost tender novel.