Virginia Woolf, left, and Leslie Stephen, right.
“Every evening we spent an hour and a half in the drawing-room, and, as far back as I can remember, he found some way of amusing us himself … many of the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father; I hear in them not only his voice, but in some sort his teaching and belief.” - Virginia Woolf on her father, Leslie Stephen, a writer, editor, and mountaineer in his right.
“There are certain arts which even the most seasoned practitioners swear remain a mystery to them. Motherhood is one. Arranging a short story collection is another. In her debut collection, Shout Her Lovely Name, Natalie Serber grapples with both, and the result is a clear-eyed case study of what’s necessary and unsolvable in each. The mothers and daughters in these stories are working out how to hold on to one another even as they scramble to get out of each other’s way.”
Source: themillions.com
Titles have a way of coming in waves. There was a time a few years back when it seemed like vast numbers of books were being published on the subject of secret lives, as in THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES, THE SECRET LIFE OF BUILDINGS, THE SECRET LIVES OF WORDS, etc. Our literature seems to hold a parallel obsession with vanishing, which involves of course any number of titles involving the words “Disappear” or “Vanishing” or “Lost.”
But no trend that I’ve ever noticed has seemed quite so pervasive as the daughter phenomenon. Seriously, once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere. A recent issue of Shelf Awareness had ads for both THE SAUSAGE MAKER’S DAUGHTERS and THE WITCH’S DAUGHTER. I’m Facebook friends with the authors of THE HUMMINGBIRD’S DAUGHTER, THE BAKER’S DAUGHTER, THE CALLIGRAPHER’S DAUGHTER, and THE MURDERER’S DAUGHTER, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
The ___’s Daughter by Emily St. John Mandel
