The importance of the letter as a material, literary, historical, and cultural object has been broadly established among scholars across disciplines. The increasing prominence of the letter has led to a body of research on familial letters, particularly between husbands and wives, fathers and children, and mothers and sons. However, much less attention has been given to letters between mothers and daughters, a critical gap that Letters Between Mothers and Daughters seeks to fill. The essays contained in the volume analyze a range of European letters, from correspondence between medieval nuns to letters from daughters to mothers in the early twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Letters Between Mothers and Daughters offers a glimpse of the changes to epistolary conventions in Europe across centuries.

Each chapter analyzes a specific set of letters between elite mothers and their daughters, with two exceptions: Clare Monagle looks at letters between two nuns in thirteenth-century Europe in chapter 1, while James Daybell offers what might be considered a primer for reading letters between mothers and daughters in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in chapter 2. Daybell introduces readers not only to letters between mothers and daughters, but also to epistolary conventions more generally. His chapter will be useful reading for anyone delving into early modern letters for the first time. Monagle evaluates the correspondence from the medieval nuns Clare of Assisi to Agnes of Prague, and argues that Clare adopts the rhetorical position of spiritual mother to Agnes as a way of establishing authority to help her achieve a specific aim.

Though other essays in the collection address letters from mothers to their biological daughters, motherhood as a rhetorical position forms a consistent theme throughout the book. Carolyn James and Susan Broomhall examine letters from mothers with dynastic interests (Eleonora of Aragon and Catherine de Médicis, respectively). James and Broomhall’s arguments both examine how powerful mothers used motherhood as a rhetorical strategy in order to shape and mold their daughters to best suit the family’s interests. These two chapters highlight the ways that affection could coexist with dynastic aims within formal epistolary conventions. The letters of Elizabeth Gaskell provide a sharp contrast to the dynastic letters from earlier centuries, and Pauline Nestor helpfully contextualizes Gaskell’s letters in the developing psychological literacy of her time and the advent of the penny postage. Nestor’s essay, more so than other essays in the collection, considers the psychology of motherhood as much as the epistolary communication through which that motherhood was performed and enacted. Letters Between Mothers and Daughters also contains two thoughtful chapters by Diana G. Barnes and Barbara Caine on correspondence across generations. Barnes looks at the letters between Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her daughter Mary Wortley Montagu Stuart, Countess of Bute, and between Bute and her daughter Lady Louisa Stuart. Caine analyzes the letters from Philippa Strachey to her mother in 1901, and from Elinor Rendel, Philippa’s niece, to her mother during World War I.

As Caine acknowledges in the introduction, the scope of the book is necessarily limited by the fact that letter-writing was largely an elite activity until relatively recently. Thus, the authors draw few larger conclusions about mother-daughter relationships, focusing instead on specific elite mothers and daughters. With its historical and geographic range, the book has ambitious aims. If read as a whole, it may disorient readers; the chapters jump across countries and centuries, often without sufficient historical context. However, each chapter functions as a discrete unit, and given that most readers will only read those chapters relevant to their research interests, such context may not be necessary.

The authors of Letters Between Mothers and Daughters face a common challenge for scholars of women’s writing: finding archival materials. Due to the quirks of archival survival, the corpus of letters between mothers and daughters is necessarily limited, and we often only have one-half of the correspondence. Thus, one of the methodological takeaways from the volume is how to read between the lines to determine what the missing letters might have said. With its attention to the material form of the letter alongside critical readings of the letters’ contents, this book will be of use to scholars of material culture, history, and literature alike. It may be of particular use to scholars newly familiarizing themselves with researching letters, but it will also benefit more experienced scholars interested in a particular set of letters or family dynasty described within the book.