Penelope Farmer has invented that new genre, the autobiographical anthology. Following on from her book of twins (for Virago) and sisters (for Penguin) this book of grandmothers describes the tentative beginnings of her own relationship to two small granddaughters, in a family where she is the first grandmother to survive in four generations. In a mass of sometimes startling, always interesting material that she has gathered from literature, science, history, biography, anthropology, she looks for the role models - and awful warnings! - missing from her own experience, and attempts to define and redefine the role of grandmotherhood in an age when fewer and fewer women fit the traditional model of sweet old grey-haired gran - if they ever did. And to show grandmothers, good, bad, old, young, happy, and sometimes wretched, as seen by themselves and by their grandchildren in all eras and from all parts of the world. In the words of one authority she quotes. 'What everyone needs in the millennium, is access to the internet - and a grandmother'...
- ISBN10 1860498485
- ISBN13 9781860498480
- Publish Date 7 March 2002
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 31 December 2009
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
- Imprint Virago Press Ltd
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 432
- Language English