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| Rachel Trethewey; photo by Poppy Jakes |
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)