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. 10, 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

They, and all beings, as the naturalist Henry Beston wrote, are “caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

From New York Times ● May 2, 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

A bevy of trial lawyers and other states are already trying to cash in on social media companies, arguing they are responsible for the travails of young people.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 3, 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

There I toiled and travailed and sweated to raise the dead.

From Atlantis by Adele Szold Seltzer

Before she travailed she brought forth; before her pains came she was delivered of a man-child.

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

Do ye remember your own mother, who travailed for ye, brought ye forth in pain, and carried ye, and nourished ye in her bosom?

From The Buccaneer A Tale by Mrs. S. C. Hall

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

With the rest of the travailing creation, she was groaning in hopeful pain—not in the pain of the mother, but in the pain of the child, soon to be forgotten in the following rest.

From Alec Forbes of Howglen by George MacDonald

And she being with child, cried travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

From Biblical Extracts Or, The Holy Scriptures Analyzed; Showing its Contradictions, Absurdities, and Immoralities by Robert Cooper

Why this groaning and travailing of the creature?

From A Short History of Greek Philosophy by John Marshall

At that very moment, Douglass, looking at a picture that should have logically thrilled him to the core, was travailing in a morose discontent quite incompatible with his environment.

From The Song of the Wolf by Frank Mayer