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The Dedication page often tells us much about an author and his or her book. I knew from Heather Ingman's dedication—“For my mother, in memory of her mother. And for my father”—that I would like Women's Fiction Between the Wars. The author, a lecturer in English at the University at Hull, where she specializes in women's studies, is sensitive to the importance of mothers and fathers. Though she focuses mainly on mothers and daughters, Ingman offers a balanced approach to the generational and intergenerational issues that preoccupy novelists'—and psychoanalysts'—attention.
Ingman explores the mother-daughter relationship in six key novelists who wrote between World War I and World War II: Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson. All six novelists were daughters, but only one, Jean Rhys, was a mother—and she was so conflicted about her mothering role that she hardly regarded herself as a parent. Faced with the difficult choice between being a writer or a mother, they chose the former, largely because they lived in a patriarchal society in which female writers were neither expected nor encouraged to have both careers and families. Ingman emphasizes fiction over biography, but she examines at the end of each chapter the writers' lives, noting their often strained relationship with one or both of their parents.
The opening chapter situates the mother-daughter relationship in a specific historical context, showing how women were disadvantaged socially, politically, educationally, and economically. For example, although the Fisher Education Act of 1918 provided elementary schooling for all children up to the age of 14, most females, including Virginia Woolf, were educated at home, receiving