The Virago Book of Grandmothers

Following on from her books of twins and sisters, the author now turns to grandmothers, describing the tentative beginnings of her own relationship to two small granddaughters, in a family where she is the first grandmother to survive in four generations. In a mass of material gathered from literature, science, history, biography, and anthropology, she looks for the role models—and awful warnings—missing from her own experience, and attempts to define and redefine the role of grandmotherhood in an age when fewer and fewer women fit the traditional model of sweet old grey-haired gran. Penelope Farmer shows grandmothers, good, bad, old, young, happy, and sometimes wretched, as seen by themselves and by their grandchildren, in all eras and from all parts of the world.