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Letters between Mothers and Daughters

In recent years scholars from many different disciplines have turned their attention to letters, pointing out that they are not only important as sources of information and ways to enable families and friends to maintain links across vast distances, but also as a literary genre with rules and conventions, a form of social practice and a means of self-fashioning. For women in particular, while mobility and opportunities for social engagement were often limited, letters offered a way not just of being in contact with people, but of determining how to represent themselves while doing so. Much of this new scholarly interest has been articulated and developed by those interested in literature, but it has served also to make historians see letters in new ways, and to develop a much greater understanding of the complexities involved in reading and using them as source materials and expanding their interest in the importance of changing epistolary practices over time. Familial letters have attracted much attention within this growing literature, showing as they do how relationships amongst kin were both maintained and changed through letters and illustrating too the importance of women in maintaining links with absent spouses, children, siblings and with wider kinship networks. Hence, there is now an extensive literature on letters between husbands and wives and between parents and children, especially mothers, and sons. As yet, however, very little notice has been taken of the letters between mothers and daughters, in terms either of the relationships that they help to elucidate or of the changing form of these letters over time. In the early modern period, as James Daybell points out, these letters were not seen as having a bearing on dynastic or political matters, and hence were rarely kept. But even in the later modern period, when letters between mothers and daughters are plentiful and well represented in many archives, they have rarely engaged the attention of historians