Not exactly the Heroine's Journey

[nancylebov]

The Heroine's Journey is being discussed over at Tor.com, and aside from the question of whether, if there isn't something parallel to Campbell's Hero's Journey for women all over the place in literature and folklore, whether that isn't what women generally want from fiction, if there's any fiction about becoming a matriarch, by which I mean a story that starts when the protagonist is a girl and finishes when she has a large, successful, reasonably happy family, with at least grandchildren if not great-grandchildren.

This isn't the story I absolutely need to read to feel good, but I think I could enjoy it.

Maybe it's in sf I've missed, maybe it's in long historicals I haven't read, maybe no one's doing it.

Comments

[mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com]

Terry Pratchett is the only one I can think of doing something like this.

[jimhenley.livejournal.com]

What about all the "three women" novels that became popular by the 1980s and may still be coming out? Gail Godwin etc.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

They're not that. I like Godwin, and Piercy, and Atwood, but they're largely about how being female in the C.20 sucks and how it's hard to have a career and love and children -- a not unreasonable theme, but quite different.

[jimhenley.livejournal.com]

Gotcha. What about when you shade into people like Barbara Taylor Bradford?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I haven't read her.

[louiseroho.livejournal.com]

Isn't there some Anne McCaffrey stuff that covers this?

[kiya]

McCaffrey has a distinct repeated pattern of "Once the lead female character Gets A Man she loses all personality and becomes all about The Domestic Bliss." (Including in cases where the Getting A Man was mediated by, y'know, sexual assault.)

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

You forgot the: daughter lives a dull, meaningless life under harsh father, until finally gets enough nerve to timidly defy father, who has reaction all out of proportion, and daughter then leaves.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

There are some (not many) mainstream books like that. Rumer Godden's China Court is really an exploration of different ways of being a matriarch -- it's five generations of family and the most important character, the one who the text calls Mrs Quin (they're all Mrs Quin...) is the one who starts off as an orphan playing in the garden and ends up passing it on to her granddaughter.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

LM Montgomery's Anne books and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women/Good Wives/Little Men/Jo's Boys both do this. (Well, they stop at children, not grandchildren, but there are some Montgomery short stories in which the children are married and having their own kids.)

[(Anonymous)]

The Pollyana books went through her children, at least.

houseboat

[romsfuulynn.livejournal.com]

Gabaldon's books are doing it, I think. She's a grandmother.

Elswyth Thane has a little of it in the first two Williamsburg books.

Absolutely Roberta Gellis's Roselynde series (this one is particularly interesting because a very young heroine in the first book has a romance, a happy first marriage, and after the death of her much older husband goes on to a second happy marriage and romance. You really might like Gellis's books.

I'd argue that Lois Bujold is doing this with Cordelia.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

There was a book (which I can't find on Amazon) called something like 'a book of ruth' which deals with the generations of women in 1 family, all named Ruth. I believe the oldest is still alive when the youngest is a child, but the principal character shifts with each generation.

Jong and Hopkinson

[(Anonymous)]

It seems to me that Erica Jong's Fanny and Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber do this. But maybe I am missing something.

David Bellamy