Women's Fiction Between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters, and Writing

Focusing on six key writers of the inter-war period--Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay and Jean Rhys--this book looks at the way these writers explore the mother-daughter relation, finding in it a key to their identity as women and as artists. By situating the mother-daughter story within a specific historical context, Heather Ingman is able, for the first time, to draw parallels between the work of women novelists and that of female psychoanalysts Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein and Karen Horney during the inter-war period. Her book argues that inter-war women writers renegotiate motherhood, rescuing it from Freud's hostile account and remolding it to suit women's actual experience in a way that empowers them as artists.