motherhood

Childcare is mothercare

6 July 2024 9:00 am

When I was a small child, my mother left me in the charge of an elderly neighbour so that she…

Why Mummy smokes

20 April 2024 9:00 am

It’s 7.02 p.m. and I’m standing outside my house by the bins smoking a fag. Upstairs, I can hear that…

Murder in the dark: The Eighth House, by Linda Segtnan, reviewed

20 April 2024 9:00 am

Motherhood prompts Segtnan to research the cold case of Birgitta Sivander, a nine-year-old found murdered in a Swedish forest in 1948

British families deserve a tax break

30 March 2024 9:00 am

I am delighted to report that some £800,000 of taxpayers’ money is to be spent ‘remediating’ the works of Robert…

A mother-daughter love story

17 February 2024 9:00 am

In her latest memoir, Leslie Jamison describes her pregnancy, experience of childbirth and devotion to her baby, returning repeatedly to the dilemmas of a working mother

Refugee lives: The Singularity, by Balsam Karam, reviewed

20 January 2024 9:00 am

The stories of two tragic mothers are interwoven in a haunting novel revolving around war, displacement, despair and the loss of children

The parent snatchers: The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan, reviewed

2 April 2022 9:00 am

Frida Liu, the 39-year-old mother of a toddler named Harriet, has a very bad day which will haunt her for…

Parallel lives: Violets, by Alex Hyde, reviewed

5 February 2022 9:00 am

When Violet wakes up in Birmingham Women’s Hospital at the start of Alex Hyde’s debut novel her first thought is…

Entirely gripping: The Lost Daughter reviewed

18 December 2021 9:00 am

The Lost Daughter is an adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel about motherhood that says, quite ferociously: it’s complicated. And:…

The cure becomes the problem: The Seduction, by Joanna Briscoe, reviewed

13 June 2020 9:00 am

Beth, the protagonist of Joanna Briscoe’s The Seduction, reminded me of Clare in Tessa Hadley’s debut, Accidents in the Home.…

Sylvia Plath with her two children and her mother Aurelia in Devon c. 1962

It’s impossible to live up to the expectations of motherhood

14 April 2018 9:00 am

In a 1974 interview celebrating the quarter century since the publication of her classic The Second Sex (1949), Simone de…

What stops women from having it all

30 January 2016 9:00 am

Don’t even ask, says Anne-Marie Slaughter, law professor and former adviser to Hillary Clinton. Motherhood still means sacrifice

Breast-feeding isn't always best

29 August 2015 9:00 am

New mothers who can’t keep to the breast-feeding orthodoxy face needless misery and shame

Driving test advice from 80 years ago

6 June 2015 9:00 am

First test The driving test celebrated its 80th anniversary. The first person to take the test, R.E.L. Beene of Kensington,…

Sex and squalor in San Francisco

5 April 2014 9:00 am

Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…