Every May we spend the second Sunday of the month celebrating mothers — the good, the not-so-good, the hard to categorize. Books about all kinds of mothers are part of every literary genre. From fairy tales to dystopian science fiction, we usually find a mother in the story. Some of those mothers, like Medea, live in infamy for centuries. Others, like the mothers in these books below, are worth remembering because they are exceptionally good in their role. With quiet grace and uncommon strength, these unforgettable moms move and inspire us. Despite the many challenges they encountered, they carried on, and provided their children with an unending supply of maternal love. Let’s honor them.
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
Agnes In Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is one of my favorite literary mothers. Married to an ambitious and mostly absent William Shakespeare, Agnes is a de facto single mother, blessed with psychic and healing powers who ignores community disapproval as she goes her independent way. Although O’Farrell imagines her marriage to the younger Shakespeare as passionate and loving despite their physical distance, it’s Agnes’s children who sustain her: “She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts.”
With the few fragments of information about Shakespeare’s family life that survive, O’Farrell has created a compelling portrait of a woman in a particular time and place who must be both mother and father, then primary mourner upon the death of her beloved son, Hamnet; a death she foresaw and feared from before he was born.
Hamnet captures the terror of illness, the persistence of grief, and the painful strength of a mother who must bear her loss alone, in near silence, while she watches her husband make art from his own. As Shakespeare did in Hamlet, O’Farrell allows the mist of the supernatural to pervade and enhance this extraordinary novel.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is, of course, a classic. From the time of its publication in 1868/69 the book has been read as a coming-of-age novel about the four March sisters: Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth. Jo usually receives most of the attention for her independent streak and her decision to marry the wrong man. (Let’s discuss!) I, too, read the book that way for most of my life, but upon rereading it as a mother and grandmother, I couldn’t help but think, “Why aren’t we all talking about Marmee?” The novel is based loosely on the author’s own family.
Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a utopian transcendentalist whose dreamy ways did not always include finding a means to support his family financially. In real life, the author had to pick up the slack first by becoming a teacher, then a maid, and finally a writer. In the novel, Mr. March is away during the Civil War, nobly serving as chaplain in the Union Army. I suspect Louisa May couldn’t quite bring herself to write “dreamer” in her character’s job description. Marmee has the generosity of spirit to say about her husband, “Your father … never loses patience, never doubts or complains, but always hopes, and works and waits so cheerfully that one is ashamed to do otherwise before him.”
But it’s Marmee who manages to put food on the table, who finds the means to clothe, tend, and nurse the girls through their illnesses, until the heartbreaking day when she can’t save her daughter Beth. Marmee teaches the girls the practical skills they’ll need to survive, if need be, on their own, and it’s Marmee who models forgiveness. Marmee is also central to the formation of Jo’s character, allowing her daughter to develop the determination she needs to achieve her untraditional goals. As a kid, I thought Marmee was a wimp. As an adult, I see her as a rockstar.
The Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Another stalwart mother deserving of our admiration is Ma Ingalls from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. I have no idea what Ma really thought when every year or so Pa decided they’d come close enough to succeeding in the woods, or on the prairie, or by the shores of Silver Lake, that it was time to start over and almost get themselves killed. Perhaps this passage gives us a hint: “So they all went away from the little log house. The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could not see them go. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under. And that was the last of the little house.”
In the books, Ma packs up her precious china shepherdess, their other few belongings, and sets out for parts unknown without complaint. Along the way, the family encounters wild animals, unfriendly natives, harsh weather, illness, and every other hardship pioneer life could offer. Did Ma ever cry her eyes out when Pa was off hunting and the girls were in school? I hope so. Otherwise, how could she have been the patient woman they needed to make meals out of nothing, quilts out of scant rags, and somehow scrape together the money to send daughter Mary to a school for the blind? For Ma’s sake, I hope she had a secret place where she could sob and then rest for a few minutes in the beauty of the natural world she loved so much. However Ma coped when troubles arrived, she found creative ways to deal with them and bore them by setting a stoic example for her girls. I will never get out my head the image of them stuck one winter with almost nothing to eat, no firewood to burn, and no way to get through the enormous mounds of snow piled outside their door.
They survived because Ma showed the girls how to twist hay into bundles that could sustain a small warming fire if they spent all day, every day, twisting hay. (The Long Winter is one of the most stressful books I’ve ever read.) As a kid, I thought author Laura was the hero, a half-pint full of spunk who got out and made good, but, as is the case with Marmee March, I now see Caroline Ingalls as the one we should celebrate. Without her selflessness, ingenuity, and deep faith, those books would never have been written.
Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese
In Laurie Lico Albanese’s Hester, we meet another mother who sacrifices almost everything for the sake of her baby. This historical novel tells the story of Isobel Gamble, who comes to the new world from Scotland in the early 1800s with her husband, Edward. He soon abandons her to serve as a ship’s apothecary so he can indulge his opium habit.
In this retelling of The Scarlet Letter, Isobel has the strong moral code and sense of propriety one expects from a 19th-century respectable woman, but she stands out, to her eventual detriment, for her astonishing needlework and her synesthesia (colors = sounds = sensations) which she works to conceal. Alone now in the English colonies, Isobel grows gradually closer to Nathaniel Hawthorne, a charming local writer haunted by his ancestors’ prosecution of the Salem witch trials. When Hester finds herself pregnant and abandoned by both men, she struggles to save herself and her baby. The novel is a rich tapestry of historical detail. The author also does a wonderful job presenting Hawthorne, not as a cardboard cutout villain, but as a complicated, less-than-perfect human being. The book includes one of the few descriptions of synesthesia I’ve read in a novel. A condition I happen to share, its beauty and strangeness are captured in this passage: “I lived in a world of magic and color then — my mother’s voice a sapphire stream flecked with emeralds, my father’s a soft caramel.
In summer, I ran barefoot through the valleys with my cousins and kin and saw their voices rise up in vibrant wisps of yellow and gold. The wind was sometimes fierce pink, and the sound of the waterfall on rocks glistened silver.” Isobel’s synesthesia is not what saves her. She does that by means of her wit and courage. But her gift for seeing things differently does enable her to envision a future where she and her daughter might thrive.
Heartwood by Amity Gaige
Heartwood by Amity Gaige is the story of a nurse, Valerie Gillis, who goes missing while hiking the Appalachian Trail. She herself is not a mother, but the novel features several memorable mother characters. Valerie maintains her hope and sanity (mostly) by writing to her beloved mother, Janet, the woman whose “heartwood” center provides the main touchstone for Valerie’s connection to the world beyond the small corner of the woods where she’s injured and stranded.
The novel focuses not so much on Janet as a specific character, but sees her instead as a symbol of maternal safety, continuity, and hope. Bev, the game warden leading the search, has a pricklier relationship with her mother that has affected her career and life choices. The third mother, Lena, is the star of the mom-show. She is a septuagenarian living in a retirement community who, despite her limited physical mobility, possesses a scientist’s relentlessly roving mind. There are a few plot twists, which I will omit from this brief description, that make this mystery a page-turner, but it is Lena’s curiosity and capacity to grow that form the heart of Heartwood. She’s a Reddit user and internet sleuth who employs her skills to provide invaluable assistance in the search. As she herself is searching, analyzing, we root for her to solve her own family mystery, and to recognize the role she played in causing a rift she thought was unbridgeable. Lena is rather crusty, impatient in the way a smart, older woman can sometimes be. As such, she keeps digging, ignores everyone telling her she’s nuts, and refuses to give up.
By story’s end, her tenacity leads her to answers, and forgiveness with a dollop of faith. As Bev says, “Human beings are pretty unforgiving. The law certainly isn’t forgiving. Forgiveness needs a messenger.” Evolving, questing Lena is a mother we should all admire.
Lit Garden is a monthly book recommendation column from Diane Parrish. You can view previous columns here.
