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

I learned that Dressler’s success had come after decades of triumph and travail.

From New York Times ● Mar. 15, 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

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

And all this time, in travail, sobbing, gaining on the current, we rowed into the strait—Skylla to port and on our starboard beam Kharybdis, dire gorge of the salt sea tide.

From "The Odyssey" by Homer

“The Bone People” follows the trajectory of a romantic comedy—a woman finds love in a meet-cute, loses that love and, after many travails, finds it again, even better than before.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 6, 2026

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

She tells me about her recent medical travails, including, as she says, “my two fake hips and my fake knee.”

From "Drama High" by Michael Sokolove

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

Soon after that, the empress travailed in childbirth, and was delivered of a fair son, at whose birth there was great and wonderful joy made.

From Mediaeval Tales by Henry Morley

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 Seosamh MacCathmhaoil

The ancient alchemists travailed to transmute the baser metals into gold; in these days whole townships are at work transmuting gold and silver into pewter.

From Greene Ferne Farm by Richard Jefferies

Thee, Lucina, the travailing Mother haileth, a sovereign 15 Juno; Trivia thou, the bright Moon, a glory reflected.

From The Poems and Fragments of Catullus by Robinson Ellis

The great vision is the woman travailing in pain to be delivered of a manchild.

From Studies in Prophecy by Arno C. Gaebelein

Yet it serves against its will, travailing as a woman in pain, with the supreme desire to be liberated from this service of the wicked, condemned world.

From Epistle Sermons, Vol. III Trinity Sunday to Advent by Martin Luther

The role it is destined to play in hastening the emergence of the world order of Bahá’u’lláh, now stirring in the womb of this travailing age, cannot as yet be fathomed.

From Messages to America by Shoghi Effendi

The agonies of a travailing age are culminating.

From Messages to America by Shoghi Effendi