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Mothers of the Mind: The Remarkable Women Who Shaped Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath
'The relationship between my grandmother and her mother was very important and indeed crucial to her childhood and the very early days of her writing … So, to have more insight into this particular aspect of my grandmother's early life is very valuable.' Mathew Prichard, Agatha Christie's grandson
Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath are three of our most famous authors. For the first time this book tells in full the story of the remarkable mothers who shaped them.
Julia Stephen, Clara Miller and Aurelia Plath were fascinating women in their own rights, and their relationships with their daughters were exceptional; they profoundly influenced the writers' lives, literature and attitude to feminism. Too often in the past Virginia, Agatha and Sylvia have been defined by their lovers – Mothers of the Mind redresses the balance by charting the complex, often contradictory, bond between mother and daughter. Drawing on previously unpublished sources from archives around the world and accounts from family and friends of the women, this book offers a new perspective on these iconic authors.
Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath are three of our most famous authors. For the first time this book tells in full the story of the remarkable mothers who shaped them.
Julia Stephen, Clara Miller and Aurelia Plath were fascinating women in their own rights, and their relationships with their daughters were exceptional; they profoundly influenced the writers' lives, literature and attitude to feminism. Too often in the past Virginia, Agatha and Sylvia have been defined by their lovers – Mothers of the Mind redresses the balance by charting the complex, often contradictory, bond between mother and daughter. Drawing on previously unpublished sources from archives around the world and accounts from family and friends of the women, this book offers a new perspective on these iconic authors.
526 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 14, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 4, 2025
I found this book frustratingly uneven. There's so much interesting information here about Julia Stephen, Clara Miller and Aurelia Plath, respective mothers of Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath, but too often this book attempts to flatten out the different mother-daughter relationships and draw reductive conclusions.
The constant repetitions of 'like the other women in this book', 'like Julia', 'like the other mothers in this book', 'as with other authors in this book', 'but, unlike Virginia or Sylvia', 'unlike Aurelia Plath', even 'Karl was to her what Ted Hughes was to Sylvia' is trying way too hard to draw hard lines between the pairs that might not really exist. It erases individuality and the complicated dynamics of motherhood and what it means to be a daughter. It's almost as if the book is presupposing some kind of essential relationship that underpins all mother-daughter interactions which doesn't take full account of how family roles and interactions are partly conditioned by historical, cultural and social pressures as well as individual personalities and psyches.
The relationships examined here can be summed up as distant motherhood (Stephen/Woolf), almost a romantically close bond (Miller/Christie), toxic co-dependency (Plath/Plath). Within that, this asserts that all the mothers had literary aspirations and all had experienced mental health problems with the clear implication that they passed both of these down to their daughters. The problem, though, is that both Julia Stephen and Clara Miller had other daughters, and Aurelia Plath had a son - so the implied direct connection to the life of a single girl child in terms of intergenerational depression and writing, bypassing the other children who are untouched, doesn't make complete sense. Maternal legacies are probably more diffuse, indirect and complicated than this book asserts.
For example, arguably Julia Stephen's distant motherhood was itself the result of Victorian values and an Anglo-Indian upbringing where paid nursery maids and servants did most of the daily care of children. How this impacted Vanessa is not discussed but Julia was probably not an unusually absent mother given her class and social position. I also wasn't convinced that Virginia's close relationships with other women such as Vita Sackville-West can be simply attributed to her search for a mother substitute. There was a lot going on in the Stephen household, not least the sexual abuse by her step-brother and her complicated relationship with her father, all of which must have compounded what the young Virginia carried into her later life. This book, to be fair, doesn't ignore these elements but, by it's very premise, loads more onto Julia's shoulders than is perhaps warranted.
It's undoubtedly the case that Woolf, Christie and Plath were affected by their mothers and their on going relationships, often troubled, if for different reasons, but the attempt to put the three into dialogue and draw universal conclusions from individual cases undermined the project for me. I guess my reservations stem not from the research that has gone into this book but the rather superficial analysis and attempts to draw neatly reductive conclusions about these women.
I was also made uneasy by the way this book uses fiction to 'read' the real-life mother-daughter relationships: while To the Lighthouse, The Bell Jar and Christie's fiction may indeed draw on life in multiple ways, they are also creative acts in which relationships are at least partly shaped by the needs of the novel in which they appear. They are not unmediated autobiography (if such a thing even exists - every act of narrative is also a shaping or reshaping of a story) - and even Plath's poetry is not confession (even if it is usually described by the literary term 'confessional' - a term still being interrogated by literary scholars) but carefully crafted verse using voices and personas to make their impact. There isn't a single voice, as is claimed here as the 'Ariel voice' - the collection is more complex and multiple that that as well as more outward looking and politicized.
It's always hard when trying to tell the stories of people associated with those more famous to not get dragged into the 'bigger' story and that happens here. Perhaps inevitably, this book is also an oblique group biography of Woolf, Christie and Plath, drawing connections between them that remain rather superficial: they were all writers, they all suffered from breakdowns, they all had difficult relationships with their mothers - in Christie's case by losing her to death at a crucial moment in her life. The most room is given to Plath, arguably the most well known, simply because the sources are so much more plentiful than for Clara Miller. This also contributed to the unbalanced feel of the book.
There is so much interest in the lives of these mothers of some of my favourite authors that my disappointment in where this falls down may be overstated for some readers. I suspect the less you know about Woolf, Christie and Plath the more you will get out of this. Still, despite my qualms and reservations, this is not a book I regret reading.
The constant repetitions of 'like the other women in this book', 'like Julia', 'like the other mothers in this book', 'as with other authors in this book', 'but, unlike Virginia or Sylvia', 'unlike Aurelia Plath', even 'Karl was to her what Ted Hughes was to Sylvia' is trying way too hard to draw hard lines between the pairs that might not really exist. It erases individuality and the complicated dynamics of motherhood and what it means to be a daughter. It's almost as if the book is presupposing some kind of essential relationship that underpins all mother-daughter interactions which doesn't take full account of how family roles and interactions are partly conditioned by historical, cultural and social pressures as well as individual personalities and psyches.
The relationships examined here can be summed up as distant motherhood (Stephen/Woolf), almost a romantically close bond (Miller/Christie), toxic co-dependency (Plath/Plath). Within that, this asserts that all the mothers had literary aspirations and all had experienced mental health problems with the clear implication that they passed both of these down to their daughters. The problem, though, is that both Julia Stephen and Clara Miller had other daughters, and Aurelia Plath had a son - so the implied direct connection to the life of a single girl child in terms of intergenerational depression and writing, bypassing the other children who are untouched, doesn't make complete sense. Maternal legacies are probably more diffuse, indirect and complicated than this book asserts.
For example, arguably Julia Stephen's distant motherhood was itself the result of Victorian values and an Anglo-Indian upbringing where paid nursery maids and servants did most of the daily care of children. How this impacted Vanessa is not discussed but Julia was probably not an unusually absent mother given her class and social position. I also wasn't convinced that Virginia's close relationships with other women such as Vita Sackville-West can be simply attributed to her search for a mother substitute. There was a lot going on in the Stephen household, not least the sexual abuse by her step-brother and her complicated relationship with her father, all of which must have compounded what the young Virginia carried into her later life. This book, to be fair, doesn't ignore these elements but, by it's very premise, loads more onto Julia's shoulders than is perhaps warranted.
It's undoubtedly the case that Woolf, Christie and Plath were affected by their mothers and their on going relationships, often troubled, if for different reasons, but the attempt to put the three into dialogue and draw universal conclusions from individual cases undermined the project for me. I guess my reservations stem not from the research that has gone into this book but the rather superficial analysis and attempts to draw neatly reductive conclusions about these women.
I was also made uneasy by the way this book uses fiction to 'read' the real-life mother-daughter relationships: while To the Lighthouse, The Bell Jar and Christie's fiction may indeed draw on life in multiple ways, they are also creative acts in which relationships are at least partly shaped by the needs of the novel in which they appear. They are not unmediated autobiography (if such a thing even exists - every act of narrative is also a shaping or reshaping of a story) - and even Plath's poetry is not confession (even if it is usually described by the literary term 'confessional' - a term still being interrogated by literary scholars) but carefully crafted verse using voices and personas to make their impact. There isn't a single voice, as is claimed here as the 'Ariel voice' - the collection is more complex and multiple that that as well as more outward looking and politicized.
It's always hard when trying to tell the stories of people associated with those more famous to not get dragged into the 'bigger' story and that happens here. Perhaps inevitably, this book is also an oblique group biography of Woolf, Christie and Plath, drawing connections between them that remain rather superficial: they were all writers, they all suffered from breakdowns, they all had difficult relationships with their mothers - in Christie's case by losing her to death at a crucial moment in her life. The most room is given to Plath, arguably the most well known, simply because the sources are so much more plentiful than for Clara Miller. This also contributed to the unbalanced feel of the book.
There is so much interest in the lives of these mothers of some of my favourite authors that my disappointment in where this falls down may be overstated for some readers. I suspect the less you know about Woolf, Christie and Plath the more you will get out of this. Still, despite my qualms and reservations, this is not a book I regret reading.
December 4, 2024
I only read the Aurelia and Sylvia Plath section of this book, since I’m not very familiar with Virginia Woolf or Agatha Christie, but I plan to return to this book once I am. This was easily the most information I’ve ever found about Aurelia Plath, who was much more interesting in her own right than most Sylvia Plath critics have led me to believe. Even Heather Clark’s brilliant “Red Comet” failed to give me a such full picture of Aurelia. I’ve always found her to be sympathetic, if not a little stifling, in Sylvia’s life story, and I still have complicated feelings about their relationship, but Thethewey’s research was thorough and balanced, and it shed a whole new light on how I see this fraught mother/daughter relationship. Once I get familiar enough with Woolf and Christie that I can appreciate biographies on them, I’ll read the rest of this book.
November 15, 2023
Mothers are the symbols of love, protection and nurture. The mother-daughter bond can run incredibly deep and develop into a powerful relationship. However, there can be another side, darker and complicated, fraught with complex interpretations that mould the two parties into being.
This is the story of Julia Stephens, Clara Miller and Aurelia Plath. As mothers of the literary sensations; Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath, these women were no less remarkable than their daughters.
Rachel Trethewey investigates with great dedication the complicated relationships between these women and their unique parallels. Each woman would go on to be a monumental influence in their daughter's personal and professional life, while the world rapidly changed and the surge in feminism challenged the socially accepted roles of women in the domestic sphere.
Sectioned in three parts for each respective mother and daughter, this book can be read chronologically, but it can also be read however you like as each section is so rigorously studied it reads like a book within itself. Trethewey's narrative is engaging and sensitive, tackling her topic with grace and respect.
With a unique angle, Mothers of the Mind is an enjoyable reading experience. Providing an in-depth analysis of three giants within literature, we are finally able to view them in a lens other than their romantic love.
My greatest thanks to @thehistorypressuk who offered me this triumph of a book to review.
This is the story of Julia Stephens, Clara Miller and Aurelia Plath. As mothers of the literary sensations; Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath, these women were no less remarkable than their daughters.
Rachel Trethewey investigates with great dedication the complicated relationships between these women and their unique parallels. Each woman would go on to be a monumental influence in their daughter's personal and professional life, while the world rapidly changed and the surge in feminism challenged the socially accepted roles of women in the domestic sphere.
Sectioned in three parts for each respective mother and daughter, this book can be read chronologically, but it can also be read however you like as each section is so rigorously studied it reads like a book within itself. Trethewey's narrative is engaging and sensitive, tackling her topic with grace and respect.
With a unique angle, Mothers of the Mind is an enjoyable reading experience. Providing an in-depth analysis of three giants within literature, we are finally able to view them in a lens other than their romantic love.
My greatest thanks to @thehistorypressuk who offered me this triumph of a book to review.
October 15, 2023
Outstanding
Fascinating insights into Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf’s relationships with their mothers, who are portrayed as powerful and interesting characters in their own right.
Fascinating insights into Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf’s relationships with their mothers, who are portrayed as powerful and interesting characters in their own right.
December 20, 2024
This is a look at the writer's Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath through their relationships with their mothers. I have read biographies of Woolf and Christie so I didn't learn too much that was new there, although I knew far less about Sylvia Plath, so probably found that section the most interesting.
Of the three, Agatha Christie undoubtedly had the best relationship with her mother, Clara. Indeed, it was probably the death of her beloved mother alongside the failure of her first marriage, which led to Agatha's notorious disappearance. All the author's explored their relationships with their mothers in books, Christie under the name of Mary Westmacott, Virginia Woolf most notably within the novel, 'To the Lighthouse,' and Sylvia Plath in, 'The Bell Jar,' and her poetry. Plath's mother was distraught by the hurtful portrait of her published after her daughter's suicide, while both Woolf's and Christie's mothers were dead when they wrote about their childhood or the relationships between mother's and daughter's.
As I read this, I thought of my own, and only, daughter. I think the relationship between mother and daughter can be the closest women ever have and the most fulfilling and yet it is so often ignored with the focus on men and marriage. Rachel Trethewey puts these relationships centre stage and I enjoyed reading this examination of how the daughter-mother dynamic worked and affected their writing.
Of the three, Agatha Christie undoubtedly had the best relationship with her mother, Clara. Indeed, it was probably the death of her beloved mother alongside the failure of her first marriage, which led to Agatha's notorious disappearance. All the author's explored their relationships with their mothers in books, Christie under the name of Mary Westmacott, Virginia Woolf most notably within the novel, 'To the Lighthouse,' and Sylvia Plath in, 'The Bell Jar,' and her poetry. Plath's mother was distraught by the hurtful portrait of her published after her daughter's suicide, while both Woolf's and Christie's mothers were dead when they wrote about their childhood or the relationships between mother's and daughter's.
As I read this, I thought of my own, and only, daughter. I think the relationship between mother and daughter can be the closest women ever have and the most fulfilling and yet it is so often ignored with the focus on men and marriage. Rachel Trethewey puts these relationships centre stage and I enjoyed reading this examination of how the daughter-mother dynamic worked and affected their writing.
October 26, 2023
Three literary giants Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath are known the world over. This book gives us the story of the remarkable women who shaped them; Julia Stephen, Clara Miller and Aurelia Plath. These were incredible and fascinating women in their own right and as parents profoundly influenced their daughters lives.
The mother - daughter bond as we know can be a tricky one to negotiate, but always for better or worse it shapes who we become. I found this such an interesting way to look at these authors, as it often isn’t done. They tend to get written about in relation to their lovers, or their writing work and their lives lived forward, rather than looking at where they came from and how their mother may have influenced their behaviour and ultimately their literary output.
I basically went straight for Agatha Christie and her mother Clara Miller first, so started in the middle! I found it utterly fascinating, meticulously researched and detailed and learned a huge amount about why my favourite author became the person she did.
But most of all I just simply enjoyed learning about three women, who I knew nothing about. This is a great book for fans of these authors but also I think is just a really important piece of history and research, well worth a read!
The mother - daughter bond as we know can be a tricky one to negotiate, but always for better or worse it shapes who we become. I found this such an interesting way to look at these authors, as it often isn’t done. They tend to get written about in relation to their lovers, or their writing work and their lives lived forward, rather than looking at where they came from and how their mother may have influenced their behaviour and ultimately their literary output.
I basically went straight for Agatha Christie and her mother Clara Miller first, so started in the middle! I found it utterly fascinating, meticulously researched and detailed and learned a huge amount about why my favourite author became the person she did.
But most of all I just simply enjoyed learning about three women, who I knew nothing about. This is a great book for fans of these authors but also I think is just a really important piece of history and research, well worth a read!
October 16, 2023
Trethewey does a remarkable job illustrating the nuances among these three sets of mother-daughter relationships and showing overall just how different mother-daughter relationships can be. She's brave to tackle the fraught issue of the Plaths and, I think, does as well as can be done with a really difficulty dynamic and history.
December 3, 2025
I really enjoyed this book. I'm always interested in talented women and their perspectives and relationships. The author writes about sensitive and possibly disturbing events, but I felt they were handled carefully and tactfully.
June 2, 2024
A very interesting read.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews