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

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

Hurston was a “keen strategist of racial deference,” and her views on America’s racial travail clashed with those of another project writer and seminal Black author, Richard Wright.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 8, 2021

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

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

Any success for England coach Brendon McCullum at this tournament has come with the caveat of the winter's Ashes travails in Australia.

From BBC ● Mar. 4, 2026

For older Angelenos who knew Lew Wasserman, watching the travails has called to mind one of the grandfather’s adages.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 21, 2026

It was an early evening in May, and the cotillion experience was long behind her, but Lily was sharing, with her new friend, the travails of her past life.

From "It All Comes Down to This" by Karen English

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

Thaa's hed both thi travails naa; thaa's travailed i' birth, and thaa's travailed i' deeath, like mony a poor soul afore thee.

From Lancashire Idylls (1898) by Mather, Marshall

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

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

From Atlantis by Seltzer, Adele Szold

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 MacDonald, George

To relax the intense nerve or deaden the travailing brain would have been painful and grievous to him.

From William Blake A Critical Essay by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

The agonies of a travailing age are culminating.

From Messages to America by Shoghi Effendi

The voice of the travailing earth played on her strung nerves as if they had been banjo-strings.

From The Furnace by Macaulay, Rose, Dame

There is a pause in the hurry, in the sorrow, of this travailing world; there is a hush.

From The Near East Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople by Hichens, Robert (Robert Smythe)