Preview of Her Mother's Daughter Summary:

In Her Mother's Daughter Marilyn French reveals the chain of destiny forged by the novel's mother-daughter relationship—links that endure and constrain through the several generations of women portrayed in the narrative. French's primary thematic focus is on how particular women's experiences and emotional needs affect their daughters and granddaughters, rather than on the more diffuse concept of motherhood as the primal human bond.

The author's stunning novel, The Women's Room (1977), immediately established her bona fides in the women's movement. Nevertheless, the narrator's reflections in Her Mother's Daughter on how her mother's deprivations shaped her own life draw more on the work of Sigmund Freud and Benjamin Spock than on feminist analysis. This more broadly psychological approach no doubt accounts for the book's popularity. Its panoramic and detailed accumulation of events produces repeated "shocks of recognition" for almost all female readers. Although specific...