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

[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.