Gainor Hughes

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Gainor Hughes (1745 – 1780) was one of the fasting women or fasting girls of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[1] Such women became the subject of public fascination. Tales of women who claimed not to eat and sometimes not even to drink, for periods ranging from a few months to fifty years. These fasters were usually poor, of humble backgrounds, living in relatively isolated rural areas, often Scotland or Wales. Although several developed a reputation for piety over the course their fasts, none claimed extraordinary religious power. Their inability to eat appears to have been triggered by physiological "chance". Contemporary interest in Hughes centred on her fast of almost six years' duration, during which time she refused sustenance other than spring water sweetened with a small amount of sugar or occasionally with a drop of weak ale.^[2] Her story resurfaced again from the 1870s,^[3] possibly as a result of an increase in cases of fasting girls, including the well-known local case of Sara Jacob.