Growing up in Surrey I had heard of Mary Toft of Godalming, a poor woman who, in 1726, was seen to give birth to a quantity of rabbits. In a region in thrall to London, where authentic local history, folklore and culture felt thin on the ground, her story often cropped up in county guides.

In 2020 historian Karen Harvey brought together an enormous amount of research in The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England, to try to understand why the hoax was perpetuated, how it came to capture the public’s imagination and what effect its exposure had – particularly on the medical establishment at the time. It is this book that forms the foundation of Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s imaginative retelling.

Mary was a seasonal field labourer paid a penny a day; she and her husband Joshua, a cloth worker, were poor almost to the point of destitution, but living in a time of gross economic inequality, cheek-by-jowl with Surrey’s super-rich. Like many of her class, she was illiterate; healthy but not, apparently, well favoured, she was described by doctors as having “a stupid and sullen temper”. A similar contempt for, and dehumanisation of, working-class women is rife today.

The first “rabbit birth” occurred not long after Mary had suffered a miscarriage; she was apparently delivered of several animal parts, which her mother-in-law Ann Toft, a sometime midwife, sent for the attention of John Howard, a doctor from Guildford. From there the sideshow snowballed, with more and more rabbit parts issuing from Mary. She was moved into John Howard’s house and then, as Howard lost control of the situation, taken to London, where she attracted the interest of the press and the king, was examined by rival surgeons and, eventually, the eminent obstetrician Sir Richard Manningham. Although some of the experts who made her their study had their suspicions, none seemed willing to rule her a fraud. This was in part due to the theory of maternal impression, which posited that anything a woman saw or even imagined while pregnant could impress itself upon the developing foetus. Under questioning, Mary told one of the doctors that she had tried and failed to catch a rabbit while working in the fields, and had dreamed of it thereafter.

Throughout Mary and the Rabbit Dream Kiss-Deáki employs anaphora, a rhetorical device in which certain words are repeated in order to link sentences together. The text is set out on the page with line breaks between paragraphs, which can be as short as a few words:

If one suddenly loses one’s tool of power, just like that, to an opposing side, one would soon be forced to make amends.

To make compromises.

To negotiate.

To negotiate, with the poorest of the poorest.

To let up, let go, and give way.

To let up, let go and give way, to certain demands, desires and wishes.

To certain demands, desires and wishes coming from the poorest of the poorest …

The effect can be powerful, creating a voice that veers from the ironic to the icily outraged. Both modes are more than justified by this version of the story, in which indignity and suffering are visited on a powerless woman by people in thrall either to their own egos or their own schemes. However, the repetition also creates an insistent tone that renders the book difficult to relax into; although the window Kiss-Deáki so cleverly opens on the past is utterly intriguing, I found it hard to read more than three or four pages at a time.

One of Kiss-Deáki’s aims was to lend Mary a voice, and she does successfully rehumanise her, making her an individual rather than a case study and, more than that, a suffering body whom we come deeply to pity. However, I would have liked more dialogue between Mary and her husband or sister-in-law, or to directly hear, rather than be told, her thoughts about the undertaking and the circumstances she found herself in. It may be that the rhetorical strength of the narrative voice made it difficult to switch into first or close first person for Mary, but the result is that for the reader she remains largely mute.

But perhaps there’s another reason for such a lacuna: the lack, in all the historical sources, of a clear, central motive for the hoax. Harvey’s book posits the “births” as an act of resistance: rabbit farming was popular on Godalming’s sandy soils, but only for the rich, and to poach one was to risk severe punishment – even in the face of starvation. Was Mary making a political point, or was she mentally unstable? Was she out for fame and fortune, or just wanting a rest from her back-breaking work in the fields? We’ll never know, but although Kiss-Deáki does make a case for one possibility, I wanted to overhear Mary grappling with it, not just watch her in its grip. The hoax, its reasons and its ramifications make for an absolutely fascinating story, but even granted the freedom of fiction Mary remains a cipher: all but silent to the last.

• Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki is published by Galley Beggar (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.