A Mother and Two Daughters was published by Viking in 1982 and was Godwin’s commercial breakthrough — a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection that spent months on the bestseller list and brought her work to an audience far beyond the literary readers who had admired her earlier novels. The novel follows Nell Best and her two daughters — Cate, a restless academic radical, and Lydia, a conventional woman undergoing a quiet revolution — through a year of change following the death of the family patriarch.
Godwin’s great subject is the inner life of intelligent women: how they think, what they want, how they negotiate between ambition and accommodation, between selfhood and relationship. Nell, widowed at sixty-three, must discover who she is without the defining relationship of her marriage. Cate, twice divorced and professionally precarious, must decide whether her unconventional life is principled or merely chaotic. Lydia, comfortable in her role as wife and mother, begins to want something more and must find it without destroying what she already has.
The novel’s strength is in its refusal to privilege one path over another: Cate’s radicalism is neither heroic nor foolish; Lydia’s conventionality is neither contemptible nor admirable; Nell’s late-life independence is neither triumphant nor pathetic. Godwin treats all three women with equal intelligence and sympathy, creating a portrait of female possibility in the early 1980s that acknowledges both the liberation and the loss that accompanies every choice.
Collecting A Mother and Two Daughters
First edition (Viking, New York, 1982): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Without jacket: $5–$10