Lena Dunham has welcomed her first child with her husband, Luis Felber, via surrogate.

The 40-year-old writer and actor, known for her creation of and role in the HBO television series Girls, revealed her daughter’s birth in a Vogue op-ed published on Wednesday.

Dunham’s daughter arrived 13 days later than expected, with Dunham writing: “I sat on a hospital bed, between the legs of a woman I hadn’t known a year ago, waiting for a glimpse of this person who I had been waiting for with something related to patience, but also none at all. I was so focused on our surrogate – in awe at her concentration, her period of quiet followed by what sounded like a roar – I forgot to look down until I heard our baby’s cry.

“I saw her face, gasping just as she did. Her eyes, wide and unfocused, taking in the light and shadow, blinking rapidly,” Dunham wrote, adding: “‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m your mama. You … you look nothing like I thought you would, but exactly right. We’ve been waiting for you, do you know that? It was so nice of you to come.’”

She went on to describe herself as feeling “bashful and dizzy with joy”.

Dunham has faced a series of fertility issues that she has publicly spoken about, including nearly two decades of advanced endometriosis as well as undergoing a total hysterectomy at 31 years old.

In a 2020 essay in Harper’s Magazine, Dunham explained her decision to walk away from what she described as the “fertility-industrial complex” following an unsuccessful IVF cycle.

“The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby. At age thirty-one, after almost two decades of chronic pain caused by endometriosis and its little-studied ravages, I had my uterus, my cervix, and one of my ovaries removed,” Dunham wrote at the time.

“Before then, motherhood had seemed likely but not urgent, as inevitable as growing out of jean shorts, but in the days after my surgery I became keenly obsessed with it,” she added.