The Mother Mirror Self-Representation and the Mother-Daughter Relation in Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras

"'The Mother Mirror: Self-Representation and the Mother-Daughter Relation in Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras' brings together two important areas of research in French Studies and in Women's Studies: the writing and reading of autobiographies by women, and mother-daughter relations as these have been theorized by both French and North American psychoanalytic schools. The three French women writers - Colette, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras - on whose autobiographical work Dr. Corbin has chosen to focus, provide a fascinating diversity in style and in socio-cultural positioning and contexts. These challenging differences work against similarities proposed by more canonical and orthodox psychoanalytic theories and by what Dr. Corbin has already observed to be a repeated pattern of telling and retelling. It is in the working out of the interplay between the same and the different that Laurie Corbin's book will make a significant contribution to the study of autobiographical writings by women and daughters." (Elaine Marks, University of Wisconsin-Madison)