Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros23.1RecensionsAlice Braun, Motherhood and Creat...

Recensions

Alice Braun, Motherhood and Creativity in Contemporary Self-Life Writing: Writers and Mothers

Collection: Routledge Research in Women’s Literature. London: Routledge, 2025. 179 p. ISBN: 978-1-03-260982-9. 140 € (Hardback); 41,56 € (eBook)
Tanya TROMBLE-GIRAUD
Référence(s) :

Alice Braun, Motherhood and Creativity in Contemporary Self-Life Writing: Writers and Mothers. Collection: Routledge Research in Women’s Literature. London: Routledge, 2025. 179 p. ISBN: 978-1-03-260982-9. 140 € (Hardback); 41,56 € (eBook)

Texte intégral

1The title of Alice Braun’s study Motherhood and Creativity in Contemporary Self-Life Writing: Writers and Mothers seems to promise esoteric analysis of a niche subject. Indeed, this is quite a detailed label which suggests a further reduction in the scope of the study with each new element to which it alludes: the relatively broad themes of motherhood and creativity will be examined in a scope which has been narrowed down by chronological period, genre, and authorial identity. The specific content to which each term alludes gradually becomes clear as one reads. “Contemporary” refers to the 21st century, the period from which Braun draws her primary source material for close readings. The genre of self-life writing is described broadly as writing in the first person about one’s experience (97). The subtitle, “writers and mothers,” might initially be read as simply referring to self-life writers who are also mothers. However, the text reveals a wider scope as Braun also discusses women writers and their relationships to their own mothers, as well as women writers who write about their decisions not to become mothers.

2Thus, from the title, one expects the text to discuss the different ways motherhood hinders and inspires creativity in contemporary self-life writing by writers who are mothers. Can one really fill 179 pages on just that? It turns out one can, in large part because Braun’s analysis takes into account the implied associations of the terms she uses in her title. “Motherhood” implies “sisterhood” and “daughterhood,” as well as the experiences of conception, pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing. “Creativity” implies the possibility of its opposite. “Contemporary” calls for an in-depth understanding of what has come before. “Self-Life Writing” must be defined in relation to other similar genres such as the motherhood memoir, essays, poems and autobiographical fiction by mother writers. Braun takes care to devote sufficient space to each of these notions, as well as to the different sides of any given issue as she explores the various challenges mother writers have faced in trying to go about their work, writers who “have had to pay a heavy price, in their private lives and in the eyes of society, who have often cast far harsher judgements on them than on their male counterparts” (5).

3Any apprehensions generated by the erudite title are quickly dispelled when one begins to read. The study is well documented, to which the frequent in-text citations, especially in the initial chapters, attest. However, the prose flows quite easily in spite of these textual interruptions. Alice Braun provides the history and context needed for one to easily follow the current debates around the texts she analyzes. This contextualization is a deliberate choice on the part of Braun, who feels “that these texts cannot be considered as if they had been written in a vacuum” (6). At each subsequent phase of her analysis, she anchors the debate in the context of the various waves of feminism and points out contradictions with which mother writers have had to contend as they attempt to assert themselves as professional writers while undertaking one of the most gendered of private sphere roles. She also discusses the ways in which literary representations of motherhood have evolved over time, “From a near-total absence in texts up to the 20th century to its foregrounding in complex, first-person narratives in the 21st century, pregnancy and childbirth are indeed beginning to gain visibility, to the point of becoming part of the common stock of human experience” (112).

4Though the table of contents lists an introduction, five chapters and a conclusion, the text seems rather to be organized into two introductions, four chapters and a conclusion. The introduction proper, subtitled “A soundproof room of one’s own,” unsurprisingly starts with remarks about Virginia Woolf’s well-known argument that if less women write, it is due to the fact that they have not had access to the same material conditions as men. Taking Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own as a starting point in a study of women writers is certainly not novel. However, Braun approaches the subject in a new light through a discussion of the real meaning of the key term “room,” which has traditionally been considered as “bedroom,” and questioning Woolf’s notion that such a space for women writers can necessarily be soundproof. Braun’s stated aim for the book, “to show that motherhood is the last frontier of female writing” (2) through a focus on representations of motherhood (4), is outlined here. The introduction then concludes with the customary chapter overview. However, Chapter 1, entitled “The Impossible Subject,” is another introduction, of sorts, as it is a chapter which functions as a self-described “introductory overview” (46) in which Braun situates her topic of the conflict between motherhood and creativity within the contexts of “maternal studies,” evolving cultural discourses, and the different waves of feminism, in order to, in her own words, “draw an overview of the current discourse around motherhood in our culture in order to show that, even when women do find the time and the mental space to write about their experience of being pregnant and interacting with young children, they are faced with such cultural prohibitions that they are often tempted to renounce writing altogether” (12).

5This dual introduction is followed by four chapters, which each look at Braun’s selected issues related to mother writing–the motherhood question, the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, the possibility that there is a distinct maternal form of writing, and the figure of the “bad mother—from slightly different, yet overlapping, angles. Each of these four chapters follows the same basic four-part structure: A. presentation of the issue; B. historical context, including pertinent well-known examples; C. close readings of contemporary examples; D. conclusion. For example, Chapter 2 begins by a discussion of Sylvia Plath’s work in the 1950s and 60s as part of the historical context, before moving on to the main contemporary examples, two works from the 2010s: Elif Shafak’s Black Milk: On Motherhood and Writing (2013) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018).

6Braun’s study is well-researched and relatively broad in scope, drawing on a wide range of examples from American, Canadian, British, Irish, Turkish and French writers, scholars and mental healthcare professionals. The arguments are built upon a comprehensive scholarly knowledge of feminism and consistently situate each discussion within the appropriate debates.

7For example, during a discussion of matrophobia in Chapter 2, Braun is careful to present both the viewpoint that “the liberating potential of mothering [is] a potentially feminist practice” (68) alongside the opposite view that motherhood is a patriarchal institution and, as such, has been considered by some “within the feminist movement […] as a form of betrayal of feminist principles, with mothers being suspected of being traitors to the cause” (69). The text is also well signposted throughout, consistently identifying the relevant chapter in parentheses when an issue has previously been discussed. The majority of any editing issues one may find with the text are of minor significance–a sprinkling of typos throughout, especially absent or extra commas–though there is, unfortunately, one quote missing from the top of page 65.

8Due to its survey-like nature, this work could serve as an introduction to the basics of feminist literary studies for students and non-specialists. Its broad scope and limited recourse to jargon also certainly make it accessible to lay readers. Scholars of feminism will find feminist theories confronted through an innovative lens, that of life-writing by mother authors; scholars of life-writing will discover the genre being put to innovative feminist ends that may ultimately have the force to sway culture into new directions. Indeed, Braun argues, “Self-life writing has been an invaluable source of empowerment for women in that it allowed them to lay out in writing the experience of being a woman as different from that of being a man; in the case of motherhood, it has made it possible to break the taboo imposed by cultural injunctions to perfection” (166).

9After outlining the multiple viewpoints surrounding each of the issues she discusses, Braun ultimately seems to suggest that the self-life writing mother writer has the power to conceptualize her own experience through the language she uses. She can choose to be confined by traditional patriarchal discourse, or not, if she can successfully navigate “the challenge of telling” her truth in her own words (101). Braun writes, “I believe that those literary narratives of pregnancy as well as childbirth are essential to recreating a network of female-centred knowledge which could counter hegemonic discourses on the subject” (100). At the end of Chapter 5, Braun argues that there is still much to be done in the field of self-life writing by mothers, primarily in terms of output. More writing by mother writers is needed to constitute a comparable corpus to that of the male literary canon and thus begin to reshape accepted cultural conventions of motherhood.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Tanya TROMBLE-GIRAUD, « Alice Braun, Motherhood and Creativity in Contemporary Self-Life Writing: Writers and Mothers »e-Rea [En ligne], 23.1 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 18 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/21123 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15cjm

Haut de page

Auteur

Tanya TROMBLE-GIRAUD

Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, France

Articles du même auteur

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search