‘Mothers of the Mind: The Remarkable Women Who Shaped Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath’
By Rachel Trethewey
The History Press, 368 pages

Sylvia Plath often looked to the life and work of Virginia Woolf for inspiration. Plath did not dwell on Woolf’s suicide, and if she ever gave a thought to Woolf’s mother, Rachel Trethewey does not say, and I never found any evidence of such in my own research.

Woolf chafed at the restraints and self-sacrifice of her Victorian mother, Julia Stephen, who seemed more comfortable attending to the needs of other sufferers than to her own demanding daughter who longed for her mother’s full attention.

Plath, as Ms. Trethewey shows, had a mother, Aurelia, who never allowed her attention to stray from her precocious daughter. Sylvia reveled in this attention, but later came to regard her mother’s ministrations as suffocating.

Ms. Trethewey makes abundantly good use of the Woolf and Plath biographies, but she rightly points out that the mothers of these famous writers never emerge as individuals in their own right, with lives that this book compares and contrasts to the affairs of their daughters.

The most striking contribution of “Mothers of the Mind” is the powerful portrayal of Aurelia Plath. She had a full life — before and after her daughter’s death. Aurelia had a sensitivity to literature, and a personality that her daughter only partially grasped and that now has been liberated in Ms. Tretheway’s perceptive account.

As Ms. Trethaway shows, Aurelia was just as passionate as her daughter, with an early love that matches in intensity what Sylvia felt for Ted Hughes, though in Aurelia’s case that first bold lover eventually withdrew from her and they did not marry.

Ms. Trethaway describes Aurelia as a brilliant teacher who made her living at various institutions of higher learning. Where mother and daughter parted company was in Sylvia’s daring devotion to literature above all else.

Ted Hughes remains curiously off stage — partly, of course as a result of Ms. Trethewey’s focus on the mother-daughter nexus. Consequently, the explanation of Plath’s last, suicidal days relies mainly on an analysis of her personality rather than on the fraught interaction with her husband.

Plath, like Woolf, tended to provide tendentious portrayals of her mother in fiction. Ms. Trethewey’s research shows how their fiction functions sometimes in contradiction to what the mothers seem actually to have been.  

Agatha Christie appears to have been as close to her mother as Sylvia was to Aurelia, and like Aurelia, Christie’s mother encouraged her daughter’s literary sensibility. Unlike the Woolf and Plath households, however, Christie’s mother, in Ms. Tretheweys’s narrative, gave her daughter the space to develop on her own. Christie, largely content with Victorian values, did not experience Woolf’s or Plath’s ambivalence. 

One aspect of Christie’s writing might well have been given a little more play: What was there about Christie’s sensibility that prompted her mother to suggest mystery and detective fiction as the right outlet for her daughter’s creativity? Why did the formulas of genre fiction appeal to Christie: What is there about the solid, solution-seeking detective that motivated Christie’s fiction? Did the resolution of ambiguity in her novels, the discovery of who did it, help her to thrive better than Woolf and Plath?

Plath wrote a poem titled “The Detective,” but some lines suggest inconclusiveness, like, “There is no body in the house at all.”  In fact, “no one is dead.” This is “a case of vaporization.” The poem’s “brown mother furrows” may refer to the indentation of a cell, as if Plath is implying that the mystery we have to ask about is the cellular composition of existence.  Watson in the poem is urged to “make notes.” There is nothing elementary, nothing Sherlockian about the “the whole estate,” which could be not one of Christie’s English estates but the human estate itself that, in the end, terrorized Plath.

Although Ms. Trethewey makes connections between the three writers and their mothers, something is missing, something that perhaps neither Ms. Trethewey nor anyone else can explain, but that Plath is getting at in “The Detective”: The mystery of existence itself.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of the forthcoming “The Making of Sylvia Plath” and is editor of “Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction.”