Intricate webs

Reading for this review I came across some apposite words by Jacqueline Rose, biographer of Sylvia Plath, cultural analyst and explorer of the lives and roles of women:

I have never met a single mother (myself included) who is not far more complex, critical, at odds with the set of clichés she is meant effortlessly to embody, than she is being encouraged – or rather instructed – to think.

(Mothers: An essay on love and cruelty, 2018)

It is a virtue of Rachel Trethewey’s triple-headed study of three fascinating women, Julia Jackson/Stephen, Clara Boehmer/Miller and Aurelia Schober/Plath, that one never underestimates their complexity and power (or impotence) – as agents, lovers, wives, writers, teachers, and mothers. Their stories – as Trethewey tells them – intricate webs of family and social history, make for compelling reading, and would even if the three had not been the mothers of Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Sylvia Plath. But whether these women were the singular shapers, the ‘mothers of the minds’ of their famous daughters – that is another question.