Book of a Lifetime: Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman

From The Independent archive: Sarah Gabriel on ‘Motherless Daughters’ by Hope Edelman

Hope Edelman: motherlessness is not all bad news, she argues (Crosbyrobert/CC4.0)

I first read this book in New York, when I was 34. I was given it by a friend and I remember being shocked just by the title: Motherless Daughters. I read it in one go, and afterwards I went to bed for three days. What can I say? I just couldn’t get up. When I emerged from this deuil, or period of mourning, I went out and bought a stack of other copies. I wrapped them in gold paper, taking great care with the hospital corners, and sent them to friends in Ireland, England and Canada. As I wrote out the addresses of these friends I realised, for the first time, that we had something in common: we had all lost our mothers young.

In her book, published in 1994, American writer Hope Edelman discusses the effect on a girl’s life of losing her mother early. Not only is the daughter stripped of her main emotional support, and forever, but she also loses a role model, a way of being a woman. She is condemned to a lifetime of periodic mourning, as the milestones of a female life – jobs, marriages, children – slip by without a mother to watch over them.