This book explores women's desire for women as it is located in examples of twentieth-century British and American women's writing, including fiction, memoir, and poetry by Virginia Woolf, Vivian Gornick, Dorothy Allison, Mary Gordon, Toni Morrison, Marilyn Hacker, and Audre Lorde. Here, Suzanne Juhasz discusses how literary writing functions to enact and negotiate a series of relationships between women: daughter/mother, mother/daughter, lesbian lover/lesbian lover, writer/reader, and reader/writer. She shows how writing is a component of interpersonal relationship and how relationship is central to the construction of personal and social identity. Uniquely weaving together psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, and literary theory as well as memoirs to examine the value and meaning of relationships between women, Juhasz explores the writings of adult daughters, mothers, and lovers to consider how language both traces and shapes the contours of relationships.
She emphasizes the initial bond between mother and infant as the bedrock of identity formation, a process involving love, recognition, desire, and language, and shows how that relationship serves as source and model for all future loves. The author begins with an investigation of the perils and pleasures of her childhood relationship with her mother. In a heartfelt memoir-in-miniature, Juhasz resurrects the artifacts of her past, and reconstructs her own desire for her mother-that is, her desire ""for love, for recognition, for the mother herself."" She then embarks on a discussion of novels that include the topics of daughters, mothers, and lesbian relationships in such works as Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Morrison's Beloved, and Lorde's Zami. Juhasz's lucid prose unravels the meaningful, yet overlooked intricacies of these relationships between women that inflect much of women's writing in the twentieth century.