travail

The author of the novel “Good Company,” on tales of travail from Edith Wharton, Elena Ferrante and others.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 6, 2026

Physical travail being an inexhaustible source of black comedy and a recurring metaphor for the human condition in Beckett’s writing, the depiction of mortal decline is on point.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 9, 2024

Mulaney's second personal travail – which he does not address at all – was his highly publicized divorce from Anna-Marie Tendler and subsequent relationship with Olivia Munn with whom he had a child.

From Salon ● May 3, 2023

He has already endured five decades of political travail and far worse from life.

From New York Times ● Jan. 28, 2020

And looking back it seemed to Carolina as if the children had been an explosion of no more than a moment’s duration, instead of a twenty-five-year travail.

From "The Milagro Beanfield War" by John Nichols

That and oil price buoyancy pushed the peso up 10% against the dollar this year despite budgetary travails.

From Barron's ● Jun. 22, 2026

Stowe’s stirring, Dickensian melodrama of a black family’s travails amid the horrors of slavery was a nationwide sensation.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026

Over the last month while in hospice, Frank did a number of interviews with US media, commenting on his life's work, the current political mood and the travails of the left.

From BBC ● May 20, 2026

You can be scared into saving by reading the travails of a person who has realized that they’ve been left behind with Social Security and little else.

From MarketWatch ● May 13, 2026

Though Chacko was not a card-holding member of the Party, he had been converted early and had remained, through all its travails, a committed supporter.

From "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

English translations of the Bible often use it in this context, such as in Isaiah 66:7: “Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child.”

From Washington Post ● Oct. 10, 2020

It be like knowing you are what praying women had in mind when they travailed for tomorrow.

From "Watch Us Rise" by Renée Watson and Ellen Hagan

For as soon as Zion travailed she brought forth her children.

From An Amicable Controversy with a Jewish Rabbi, on The Messiah's Coming by Park, J. R. (John Ranicar)

Kneeling down in the dark She travailed without a cry, And gave him the mothering kiss Between the earth and the sky.

From The Mountainy Singer by MacCathmhaoil, Seosamh

She waved not a hand, fluttered no kerchief of farewell, only stood sadly watching the sons with whom she had travailed, like one who watches the dear dead borne to their last resting-place.

From The Black Douglas by Richards, Frank

And while the brain that was to rule France as a tribune-king, was thus evolving its idle progeny, the womb of a Corsican woman near him was travailing with him who was to be Napoleon!

From Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. by Various

After "travailing all winter long," sleeping on snow without shelter, and suffering other hardships, they reached Europe in June, 1247, where they were "rejoiced over as men that had been risen from death to life."

From Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) The Romance of Reality by Morris, Charles

"Now leave my bower, Willie," she said, "Now leave me to my lane; Was never man in a lady's bower35 When she was travailing."

From English and Scottish Ballads, Volume II (of 8) by Various

Some purpose, in the stress Of travailing tongues, to birth finds not a way: What all would utter, none has wit to say.

From Etain the Beloved and Other Poems by Cousins, James Henry

We can, at the present moment, experience its stirrings in the womb of a travailing age—an age waiting for the appointed hour at which it can cast its burden and yield its fairest fruit.

From The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh by Shoghi Effendi