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In honour of Mother's Day (in North America at least), was thinking about the range of "mothers" in Jane Austen's stories. Mothers are often ineffective, overbearing or just plain absent. Some examples:
Mrs. Bennett: while her intentions are honourable (she's trying to get her daughter's settled), she's not really equipped to make it happen and the fact that it happens at all is in spite of her efforts rather than as a result of them.
Lady Catherine: her role is less that of "mother" and more of "matriarch". She's old guard and her role is to maintain the traditions that have benefited her and her family.
Mrs Dashwood: impractical and overly romantic, she is lost when her husband dies and her young oldest daughter has to step in.
Mrs Price: Fanny's mother is so overwhelmed with her situation that she freely gives up children to her family members
Lady Bertram: once she gave birth to her children including the heir and a spare, she adopted the role of decorative wife and mother, indolent and self-absorbed she abdicates much of her parenting duties to her sister.
Mrs. Clay: the young widow who leaves her children to someone else to care for while she pursues "opportunities" in Bath and elsewhere
Mrs Jennings: she's everyone's mother and takes charge of young women to get them settled in society.
And then we have the heroines and side characters who are motherless: Emma, the Elliot sisters, the Bingleys, Darcy, Jane Fairfax, Frank Churchill, the Steeles sisters.
And the "stand-in" mothers: Mrs Gardiner, Lady Russell, Mrs Weston, Mrs Allen
Quite a range of mothers and mothering!
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Let us not forget Catherine Moreland's mom who is affectionate, practical, effective, and had to be out of the way for anything interesting to happen to her daughter 😉
Regarding Mrs Clay, I wonder how her children got on after their mom became Mr Elliott's mistress
Mrs Moreland is the most normal healthy mom in Austen's novels..
Mrs. Morland is the best main character mother in Austen! Love her.
Definitely
Mrs. John Knightley (Isabella): devoted, over-careful, loving. I can see her becoming a modern helicopter mom.Â
There’s one Elliot mother- Mary. She also leaves the care of her children to others and doesn’t discipline well.
Motherlessness was more common in Austen's world than ours, too, as so many women died while their children were young.
Yes, but it's interesting that Austen doesn't give us any orphaned heroines. In fact the heroine who is having the worst time (Fanny) basically has 5 parents and they all fail her.
She doesn't use the orphan trope, she's more about parents being the problem!
A competent, involved mother makes it a lot harder to get into teenage misadventures. I've seen people draw conclusions about Austen's mother based on her fiction, but if real life were so easily reflected in fiction, then we should expect that JA had been one of a family of all sisters instead of the one she was in. But families of all sisters, like negligent or absent mothers, create better conditions for stories.
Don't forget Lady Susan who is the most villainous of the moms.
This may happen in the popular movie adaptation but not in the book. In the book, Mrs. Dashwood arranges the rental of Barton cottage as well as the move. Elinor advises on a greater retrenchment than Mrs. Dashwood would be inclined to do, but that doesn't make Mrs. Dashwood impractical, just a woman with different priorities.
She means well and is certainly handling things better than, say, Mrs. Bennet, but she's also not exactly as levelheaded or contained as her eldest daughter. In Chapter 1 she's described thus:
That definitely sounds like Elinor having to step in at moments when her mother should be doing so.