Description: The rise of the novel and of the ideal nuclear family was no mere coincidence, argues Susan C. Greenfield in this fascinating look at the construction of modern maternity. Many historians maintain that the eighteenth century witnessed the idealization of the caring, loving mother. Here Greenfield charts how the newly emerging novels of the period, in their increasing feminization, responded to and helped shape that image, often infusing it with more nuance and flexibility. By the end of the eighteenth century, she notes, novels by women about missing mothers and their suffering daughters abounded. These works eventually became part of a literary tradition with politically complex and psychologically enduring effects.

Highlighting the novels of Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Amelia Alderson Opie, and Jane Austen, Mothering Daughters relates these works to contemporary representations of female sexuality, pregnancy, and breastfeeding, to parliamentary debates about child custody, and to discourses about colonialism and racial difference. Even as the political implications of the novels vary, the books uniformly insist on the tenacity of the mother-daughter bond despite the mother's absence. Exploring the historically contingent assumptions about maternal care that informed writers during this period, Greenfield argues that women's novels helped construct the story of mother love and loss that psychoanalysis would soon inherit.

Mothering Daughters offers a rich cultural context in which to read the great as well as lesser-known works of early women novelists, while placing the concept of motherhood in a broad historical framework.

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