Book description
In this remarkable book, Jane Miller writes about the experience of
being a daughter and a sister, about the intensities of family life
and the illuminations that come from the last days of parents.
Relations describes a record-keeping kinship and offers
portraits of her parents' long marriage, its mysteries and
incompatibilities, of her grandfather, the scientist Redcliffe
Salaman, and of her great-aunt Clara Collet, one of the first women
civil servants. It is a story in which Karl Marx and George Gissing
have parts to play.
Here are the tensions of belonging and yet not belonging to an
English middle-class at once hospitable to difference and internally
divided. More than two hundred years of English history are present in
these portraits, which show the dawning emancipation of women and the
effects of empire on family life. It is the story of an evolution, of
a move out of trade towards public service and the professions, and
towards the dramas and family romance of recent times.
Jane Miller is Professor Emeritus, London University Institute of
Education. She is the author of
Many Voices, Women Writing About Men,
Seductions, More Has Meant Women: The Feminisation of Schooling
and
School for Women.
