SOURCE: Luckhurst, Roger. “‘Impossible Mourning’ in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Michèle Roberts's Daughters of the House.” Critique 37, no. 4 (summer 1996): 243-60.

In the following essay, Luckhurst draws on postcolonial theory to find parallels between the novels Daughters of the House and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Why these two texts together? Can the link between one of the most celebrated African American texts of recent years and an Anglo-French writer's latest novel be anything but cryptic? Toni Morrison's oeuvre has fostered a massive critical industry; Beloved alone is the subject of some thirty articles. Michèle Roberts has been an important, but resolutely marginalized presence on the British literary scene, her work shunted off into the area of programmatic feminist texts, with Daughters of the House somewhat patronizingly described as a breakthrough novel. Given the disjunctions of cultural history, ethnicity, and literary tradition between their sites of production, does...