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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.
Marilyn French
Marilyn French (1929-2009) was regarded as one of the greatest living feminist writers. Her controversial and provocative first novel, The Women's Room published in 1977, sold twenty million copies worldwide and quickly became a classic of the women's movement. She was also mentioned in the 1982 ABBA song, The Day Before You Came. Additionally, Marilyn French was a literary critic.
French was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1992. This experience was the basis for her book A Season in Hell: A Memoir (1998). French died from heart failure at age seventy-nine from Manhattan, New York City.
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