Her Mother's Daughter

Famed feminist Marilyn French’s life-affirming saga celebrates the love and sacrifices of four generations of Polish-American mothers and daughters.

With Bella Dabrowski close to death, her daughter Anastasia, who has reinvented herself as Stacey Stevens, is trying to penetrate the longstanding barriers between them to understand the woman who gave her life.

Through the eyes of Stacey, a divorced, feminist New York photographer, we get to know Bella, a remarkable woman, wife, and mother. The daughter of Polish immigrants, Bella, who renamed herself Belle, clawed her way out of poverty and settled into a middle-class existence.

Shifting perspectives between the two women, the reader is drawn into Belle’s life through the lean years of the Depression as well as Stacey’s recollections of her youthful marriage, a lesbian affair, and her tempestuous relationship with her own daughter, Arden.

From the groundbreaking author of The Women’s Room, Her Mother’s Daughter explores past and present to reveal the complex, indestructible bonds between daughters and mothers.

Summary from Library Journal:
Ten years after The Women's Room , French gives us another captivating and lengthy novel on women's lives. Here, Anastasia narrates her life experiences by blending them with those of her grandmother, mother, and daughter. Each woman has been determined not to make the sacrifices her mother made, instead seeking joy, freedom, and independence. And in doing so, each has become like her mother: emotionally drained, alienated from her children, and alone. By probing the past and living the present, Anastasia comes to understand the silent bond between mothers and daughters.