"An Emotional Voyage": Dr. Rachel Trethewey on Writing About Mothers

Rachel Trethewey; photo by Poppy Jakes

Published this week by The History Press UK, Mothers of the Mind is a triple biography of Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Sylvia Plath and their mothers, researched and written Dr. Rachel Trethewey, a fellow of Britain's Royal Historical Society and the author of five nonfiction books: Mistress of the Arts, Pearls Before Poppies, Before Wallis, The Churchill Sisters and now, Mothers of the Mind.

Dr. Trethewey read History at Oxford University, then did an M.A. in Victorian Studies followed by a Ph.D. in English from Exeter University, where she will speak about the book in November. I had questions I wanted answered right now, and Dr. Trethewey kindly replied.

1.     Why did you choose Woolf, Christie, and Plath?

      I first had the idea for this book at an exhibition at the Tate of St Ives in Cornwall. Alongside a quotation from Virginia Woolf, “We think back through our mothers if we are women,” was a bewitching photograph of her mother, Julia Stephen. It made me want to know more about Julia and her relationship with her famous daughter. I then wondered if the quotation was equally true for other female writers.

     As an avid reader of literary biographies, I recalled that Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath also had intense relationships with their mothers. Fascinated by Plath since I was a teenager, I had always wondered how her mother coped with discovering Sylvia had such a different view of their bond. Agatha Christie had also always been on my radar because I was born and brought up in the same town as she was, Torquay, in Devon. Perhaps because I am so close to my own mother, when I read a biography of Christie, I was struck by her great affinity with her mother.

      When planning this book, I did consider other writers, but the mother-daughter bond was not so central to their lives. For instance, I am very interested in Daphne du Maurier, but her father was the focus of her early life.

2.     Why write about these writers’ mothers? What were you thinking?

      Inevitably every woman is influenced by her mother, but I wanted to write about exceptional mother-daughter bonds. My criteria was that the relationship must have profoundly influenced the famous author’s life, literature, and attitude to feminism. Like Virginia Woolf, I believe not enough has been written about women’s relationships with each other. Too often Virginia, Agatha, and Sylvia have been defined by their relationships with their lovers. I wanted to redress the balance by focusing on their formative affinity with their mothers. As I began researching, I discovered that the mothers were just as interesting as their offspring, formidable women who had shaped the outstanding writers their daughters became.

 

3.     Woolf and Plath had older, tyrannical, intellectual fathers and self-sacrificing mothers with Victorian values. It seems like a kind of formula that encourages creative daughters. Your opinion?

I was struck by how many similarities there were between two of the fathers, Leslie Stephen and Otto Plath. Intellectuals who wanted to be seen as geniuses, they were disappointed when they did not live up to their own exacting expectations. This had serious repercussions for their families. They were demanding men to be married to, who drained their equally talented wives. 

 

I agree that this complicated family dynamic played its part in the development of creative daughters. In each case, both parents were exceptional and had varying degrees of literary talent, which Woolf and Plath inherited. Their parents noticed and nurtured their children’s creativity. Family tensions also later provided plenty of subject matter for the daughters to write about. Certainly, the way the daughters viewed their mothers’ treatment influenced their feminism. They rebelled against a sexist society in which vibrant, independent young women were transformed into exhausted, self-sacrificing wives. 

 

However, although their daughters viewed them as martyrs, Julia and Aurelia perceived themselves as having more agency than that. As my book shows, they lived very full lives and would not have wanted to be viewed as passive victims. As Aurelia once wrote, Sylvia could only imagine what she thought her mother thought. Her mother's true feelings were very different.

 

4.     None of the mothers was abusive. Or were they?

None was, but Virginia’s and Sylvia’s relationships with their mothers proved to be detrimental to their mental health. When Virginia was a child, Julia was so involved in philanthropy and nursing that she was rarely alone with her daughter. When present, Julia was often sharp-tongued and impatient. Her death, when Virginia was thirteen, was devastating for her daughter. The Bloomsbury author felt haunted by her mother for the rest of her life. She tried to recapture her in her literature, but Julia always remained elusive.

 

Agatha’s relationship with her mother Clara was certainly not abusive. Clara’s unconditional love provided the firm foundation on which Agatha built the rest of her life.

 

Sylvia’s bond with Aurelia was arguably the most complex of the three. Plath’s psychiatrist encouraged the poet to believe that the mother-daughter relationship was at the root of many of her mental health problems. However, I think Aurelia always did her best by Sylvia, often at great emotional, physical, and financial cost to herself. It seems to me that both mother and daughter loved each other deeply, but the way their personalities reacted to each other could be toxic; perhaps they were just too similar. As perfectionists, they both wanted a perfect mother and daughter relationship, but that was just not possible in the real world. 

  

5.     Why did you include among your three writers an American younger by 50 years than the British writers? Are you one of those who consider Plath as British as she was American?

My criteria was the strength and complexity of the mother and daughter relationship rather than when they were born. However, as I wrote the book I was pleased that it covered a wide time span because it ended up charting how far attitudes to women’s roles had changed over a crucial century for feminism. I was also interested to see how Plath was able to take both her literature and feminism a stage further than Woolf had. For instance, Virginia broke new ground in the way she wrote about women’s bodily experiences, and Sylvia went further by writing about the visceral experiences of motherhood. 

 

I don’t consider Plath as being as British as she was American. Tracing both Sylvia’s and Aurelia’s story, I think it is tied up with the American dream. The fact Aurelia was the daughter of immigrants played an important role in Aurelia’s attitude to life and influenced Sylvia imaginatively, as can be seen in some of her short stories which drew on her mother’s experiences. My research also showed that rather than Aurelia being an atypical pushy mother, her parenting was influenced by the culture of her era in America. Her didactic approach was very similar to that of Rose Kennedy, who also acted as a teacher as well as a mother to her embryonic political dynasty. 

 

6.     Woolf and Christie came from families with money and status. Plath did not. What difference did this make, in your opinion?

A great difference. As I wrote about Aurelia Plath, I felt her life was the embodiment of Woolf’s feminist theories. Virginia’s tract suggesting that a woman needed an independent income and "a room of her own" to write came out at about the time Aurelia was choosing her career. Like Sylvia, Aurelia was exceptionally clever and ambitious; she wrote a brilliant thesis about Paracelsus, and could have pursued a career in academia. She also had aspirations to write, and would have liked the chance to explore a literary career. However, because her family lacked money and status, she had to take the safer option and become a teacher.

 

Finances also affected her relationship with her daughter. Aurelia wanted Sylvia to have all the opportunities she had missed out on. She worked exceptionally hard to make that possible. At times Sylvia resented her mother’s self-sacrifice. When Plath went to Smith College, she was very aware that she had to work hard for the same lifestyle her wealthier contemporaries took for granted. 

 

7.     Can you speak briefly of your own mother’s influence on you?

My mother Bridget has been my rock throughout my life. She has always supported me without smothering me and our relationship has been one of the most complete and uncomplicated in my life. I consider myself very lucky to have experienced that unconditional love. She has been very involved in this project from start to finish. She was with me when I first had the idea at the art exhibition and, while I was writing the book, she encouraged me every step of the way. I have dedicated it to her because our relationship is what really made me so interested in other mother-daughter bonds.

 

8.     Anything else you find interesting or want your readership to know?

Writing this book has been an emotional voyage of discovery for me. I found myself comparing my relationships to the bonds I was writing about. I didn’t find one formula which makes for a good relationship. But it did make me question how well we can ever know another person, even those we love best. I realized that rather than want our loved ones to be happy, we should want them to be fulfilled, and only the person themselves can know what will give them that fulfillment. At times I found writing the book harrowing, particularly the parts about Aurelia and Sylvia: I could feel how powerful the love between them was, and it was so sad that it went wrong. 

Mothers of the Mind: History Press.com UK ISBN: 9781803991894

Mothers of the Mind Amazon Pre-Order USA (April 2, 2024)

What Is a Traumatic Death?

Would you agree that a death (which is always a loss) is an especially traumatic loss if:

·      it occurs without warning

·      is untimely

·      involves violence

·      there is damage to the loved one’s body

·      the survivor regards the death as preventable

·      the survivor believes that the loved one suffered

·      the survivor regards the death, or manner of death, as unfair and unjust [1]

 

If you agree that any sudden needless untimely death, especially your child’s, is particularly grievous, then imagine Aurelia Plath’s grief after her daughter Sylvia died, overseas, at age 30. Told at first that Sylvia died of pneumonia, Aurelia learned days later that it was suicide, and son Warren told Aurelia the context and the details.

 

Aurelia wrote a brief angry note to a London newspaper that says those responsible for Sylvia’s death “know who they are.” She did not mail it, but kept it; it’s in archives. For future readers of this unsent letter, Aurelia added the initials of the suspect parties.

 

I can’t find in Sylvia Plath studies any respect or allowance for Aurelia’s trauma and grief. Her trauma would be as severe and multidimensional as ours if authorities phoned right now to say they found our child dead by suicide on a kitchen floor.

 

Rather than empathy (meaning, feeling what others feel) or sympathy (saddened by what others must be going through), Plath biographies and essays imply that Sylvia’s U.S. death notices – few and short because Sylvia wasn’t famous yet -- do not say “suicide” because prim Aurelia hoped to hide the real cause. No reason besides her personal character flaw.

 

We will be called to account for our assumptions.

 

Studies of mothers whose children died by suicide say mothers have not only the grief of suddenly losing a child but a burden of guilt, and, on top of that, they are judged. Even people who know suicide is never simple still suspect that a young suicide’s parents did not love them enough or in the right way, or were not prescient enough, or present enough, to stop them.

 

Aurelia in 1963 sent Sylvia’s friend Elizabeth Compton a note that was less about Sylvia than Aurelia’s own grief. Compton was offended and later sent Aurelia’s letter to a biographer as an example of Aurelia’s true personality. In summer 1963 Aurelia went to England. Her son-in-law, unable to think of any good reason a parent might want to visit their dead child’s former home and grave and children, thought Aurelia was coming for an “investigation.” And that she might dump too much love on her grandchildren. Remember he too was bereaved, as were the grandchildren.

 

Sylvia’s readers sympathize with her loss of her father and how his death changed her. It would be a truer picture if we saw that his death disrupted and changed her whole family. Sylvia’s 1953 suicide attempt shocked and terrified them. Aurelia wrote that she dreaded a recurrence. For her and her son 1963 was the second time around, only worse. Two families became survivors of a suicide and to this day they have not heard the end of it.

 

The National Alliance on Mental Illness says each suicide directly affects about 115 people and one in five (=23)  are devastated.

 

Living in a time of epidemic suicide we know that survivors of traumatic loss might cope by saying or writing tasteless vengeful unhinged or sentimental things, or frame the death as a murder, point fingers, or try everything to fix or explain it and never heal. A percentage will commit suicide themselves. Sylvia’s traumatic death very obviously colored all that occurred afterward, not much of it worth celebrating.

 

Sylvia suffered. But so did her family.

 

[1] “Traumatic Bereavement: Basic Research and Clinical Implications,” M. Barle, C. Wortman, J.A. Latack, 2017.