A wedding could be organised quickly, the legal requirement was for banns to be read 3 consecutive weeks.
Not well informed young women can be pregnant for a while before they realise, hence 'I didn't know until I went into labour' stories. Or wise gran might have her waiting for missed periods. Suppose she showed at 20 weeks. In rural & working class areas, a wedding at 24 weeks with a careful choice of clothing wouldn't be unusual. Kid legally 'legitimate'.
Noticing is a question of knowledge and character. Will she notice her first missing period, will she understand what it means, she take it seriously? If the answer to all of this is a yes and the parents on both sides are not given to drama then they can get their license, have their banns read and marry before she's more than 12 weeks along.
@CatFoxBirdLady@writers That's useful to have an a delimiter on the early side of things. I feel like maybe she'd be slower off the mark though - if not through complete ignorance then at least a hefty dose of denial.
Slow off the mark opens endless possibilities to torture that character. For example, she'll probably be irregular, being young, but it might well be painful enough that she'll notice the absence of pain, even if she manages not to notice any other changes.
If you want the families to have a chance to preserve some face she needs to built up a good panic before the four month mark.
@writers I reckon it could be 3 or 4 weeks at most for her to realise, she might hide it for another couple of months... hasty wedding on the quiet another two weeks after that perhaps, if they slip the priest a bribe. So maybe the pregnancy is not quite halfway through by the time she's at the altar? And that's approaching mid to late December?
@drinkswriter@writers sex on first day of cycle, period after 25 days, definitely wouldn't be panicking until 6ish weeks unless mega-regular. Also don't know about 1890s but pregnancy is measured from first day of last period so she could be 6-8-10 weeks pregnant when she finds out
@drinkswriter@writers i think there are no rules, is the problem, so on the one hand you could probably make them up for your character, but on the other hand, it might scan funny
@emma Yeah experiences differ so widely, from "realized the second they missed their first period, possibly even before" to "did not realize until literally in labor." Both are rare extremes and most fall somewhere in between. Those closer to the latter likely have more irregular periods and may have had spotting/showing throughout pregnancy that could pass for their "normal" periods.
I was closer to the more aware end of things, something like the timeline @drinkswriter posited because there was a "tingling" in my uterus about a month after my last period that definitely did not feel like business as usual. I was 36 and actively trying, though--that tingling has since evolved into a robust 7-year-old boy. I also had the benefit of an at-home pregnancy test, then an obgyn visit, that confirmed my spidey senses. If I were a teenager who was less experienced in my body senses and were invested in denying the consequences of fooling around, with no easy access to medical technology for confirmation, the first signs were subtle enough to ignore.
An additional consideration, given the time period, nutrition an so on, is that the girl in question might just barely have begun to get a cycle. That would make things even more irregular, and she would have less knowledge of what a normal cycle looks like for her. @writers
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