Books to Celebrate Motherhood and Mothers

Two admired books about the mother-daughter bond are works by Jamaica Kincaid. In her first novel, Annie John, she writes about a young girl coming of age on the island of Antigua. It is the story of the loss of childhood and celebrates the intense bond between Annie and her mother. Her mother is her sole focus and world. Her mother is her shadow-life.

In this novel, the early loss of protagonist Xuela Claudette Richardson’s mother during childbirth makes her unable to form lasting attachments. Throughout the novel, a deep and fierce longing for maternal love persists. “Motherless women have no protector, no guide, no model for negotiating the fraught relationship between the feminine and the masculine, no one to reassure them in the most basic human way that the world is interested in making room for them.” Perhaps because I lost my own father at age two, this novel particularly struck a chord and made me reflect on what it meant to be fatherless and how that shaped my own attachments.

One of the finest novels in the English language. Mrs. Ramsey, the mother of eight, represents the traditional nineteenth-century mother. Devoted to her family, she has lost her own passion. The novel can be read as a feminist cautionary tale about saving parts of ourselves as mothers. It also highlights the mother/artist binary. Mrs. Ramsey embodies the Victorian mother, while her friend, artist Lily Briscoe, represents the independent artist. Only after Mrs. Ramsey’s death can Lily finish her painting, satisfying Virginia Woolf’s desire to release women beyond motherhood.

The Ferrante Quartet is an incredible set of books about the forceful and passionate friendship between Lenu and Lila that takes them from young children until old age as they navigate the tensions and violence in their neighborhood in Naples, Italy. I recommend the quartet for anyone who is struggling between her own desires and her role as a mother. Once Lenu marries and has children she longs to have the time to write. When I came upon a passage where her husband reacts with sarcasm to the idea she deserves time, and another character calls it a political crime to waste a woman’s intelligence—my heart stopped. Enough said. Read it!

It’s no wonder that I fell in love with this novel as a young girl with four sisters and a longing to be a writer. Never was there more of a devoted mother and wife than Margaret March, or Marmee as she is called by her daughters. Marmee is the moral center of the novel. Her role is to encourage her daughters as they evolve from adolescence into women. She represents the ideal mother who hovers over her daughters. However, Marmee is more complicated then she appears. f you haven’t read this novel that filled me with want and fortitude, you are missing out.

In First Love, Neve’s mother is self-absorbed, sad, and petty. James Wood, in his review, writes, “I don’t recall reading many novels as grotesquely honest about the original sin of being born to inadequate parents.” He also notes, “Mothers, alas, stick around longer and want more, cleaving to their adult children with a sickly persistence.” The novel is a devastating, often crude portrait of a daughter trying to live her own life in a complicated marriage, yet tormented by her mother’s self-interests. Why read such a harsh portrayal of motherhood? It reveals the consequences of mothers who can’t get past themselves. I couldn’t put it down.