A Child of One's Own

A fascinating study examining the diversities and novelties of contemporary parenthood in the light of a range of literary and philosophical works ranging from Greek tragedies to contemporary psychoanalytic theory by way of diverse writers from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her previous books include Just Looking and Carried Away, both about the history of shopping; Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis; Shopping with Freud; Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf; and Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities.

Introduction
1: Changing Conceptions
2: Surrogates and Other Mothers
3: Reproductive Choice: A Prehistory
4: Foundling Fathers and Mothers
5: Childlessness: Euripides' Medea
6: A Tale of Two Parents: Charles Dickens's Great Expectations
7: Finding a Life: George Eliot's Silas Marner
8: His and Hers: Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
9: Placement: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
10: At All Costs: George Moore's Esther Waters
11: Between Parents: Henry James's What Maisie Knew
12: Parental Secrets in Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge
13: 'I Had Barbara': Women's Ties and Edith Wharton's 'Roman Fever'
Afterword