As a teenager on visits home he was exasperated by her “timid” remarks and strove to distance himself as a writer he now sees his deep kinship with her, his own early insecurity with words, and his instinct for a story. Just as sharp in its focus on class is Ian McEwan’s tender remembrance of his mother, Rose, a shy working-class woman who lived in fear of language and the social abyss it obliged her to skirt. Warning: don’t insist on living with your child when they go to university, as Margaret did with John Ruskin at Oxford Psychologically he never eluded her sway, and much of his work sprang from their antagonism. May was an “ill-tempered” matron who quarrelled with her servants as well as her son, cosseting and constricting him at once. Margaret Drabble’s account of Samuel Beckett’s relationship with May, his formidable mother, brings to life a prosperous Dublin household of artistic striving, frequent illness and severe Protestantism. Drawing on her father’s unpublished memoirs, Carver paints so detailed and vivid a picture of this displaced Cornishwoman and her benign “witchcraft” that the portrait seems to overrun the frame and become a study of aspiration and social mobility: “If class weren’t so serious a matter in England, it might be thought of as the national hobby.” Class is an invisible engine in these pages. In a wonderful piece Judy Carver considers the life of her grandmother Mildred, the mother of William Golding, and her “uncanny awareness” of people. The keynote in nearly all of them is gratitude, for in the long perspective a writer must acknowledge a link between nurturing an offspring and nurturing a talent – both of them blood-deep, life-defining and mysterious. H as there lived a writer who claimed never to have been influenced in the smallest part, for good or ill, by their mother? In this lively collection of essays, the legacy of maternal blessings (which they mostly describe) is thoughtfully and skilfully unpacked, either first-hand, via personal memoir, or second-hand, via biographical portrait.
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