The Cruel Mother: A Memoir

In August 1919, just a week after giving birth to girl triplets, Busby's great-grandmother, Beth Wood, drowned the two surviving babies in a bath of cold rainwater. She had been a good mother to her three older boys, mourned the death of an earlier girl and claimed, until her death in 1957, never to remember what happened that night. Prompted by the trauma of her own difficult labor followed by deep postpartum depression, Busby decided to investigate her great-grandmother's difficult life as a working-class girl in rural England. It's an absorbing, informative account. Beth was the daughter of a shoemaker and a lace maker, two professions on their way out by the turn of the century. She began to learn lace making at age five, attended school for a few years but went into domestic service at 13, first as a "day-girl," then for eight years as a "cook-domestic" until she married in 1901. The written evidence of Beth's life is scarce, but Busby provides a wealth of sympathetic but sobering material on the life of the working poor a century ago, with its trappings of depression, abortion, infanticide and "puerperal insanity." (Sept.)