Mothering Daughters

This book gave me some good insight into Jane Austen's novels and the relation of the mothers to daughters. It helps support my points that when mothers are not present or behaving in the ideal way, their daughters suffer because of it. They resent their mothers and experience emotional distress.

"Emma suggests that the loss of materal attention if damaging to a child's mental health...It's not in clearly visible suffering but in the inarticulate subtlety of emotional distress." (146)

"In Pride and Prejudice, the less tender but anxiously matchmaking Mrs. Bennet is plagued by realistic concerns about women's economic disadvantages; her "total want of propriety," however is deplored and Elizabeth and Jane rise because they are distinguished from her. As Darcy tells Elizabeth, "let it give you consolation to consider that, to have conducted yourselves so as to avoid any share of the like censure, is praise no less generally bestowed on you and your eldest sister than it is honourable to the sense of disposition of both."" (149)

Greenfield, Susan C. Mothering Daughters. Detriot: Wayne State University press, 2002. Print.

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