In now famous words, the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich called the mother-daughter relationship “the great unwritten story”. All “the materials are there” she wrote, “for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement” (225-6). Rich praised Virginia Woolf for creating in
To the Lighthouse“what is still the most complex and passionate vision of mother-daughter schism in modern literature”, referring to it as “one of the very few literary documents in which a woman has portrayed her mother as a central figure” (227). How tragic that in 1972 when Rich began her ground-breaking book
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, she did not even know of another equally complex and passionate vision of the mother-daughter relationship that also…
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Citation: Carpentier, Martha. "Brook Evans". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 October 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16006, accessed 23 November 2024.]
