Martina Lamb in Lisa Jewell’s number one bestseller THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS is “not the best mum, but not the worst,” and yet she is brainwashed into allowing the charismatic David take over her Cheyne Walk mansion, siphon off her family’s assets, inflict violence—and, ultimately, devastate her family’s life. As she explains to her incredulous son, Henry, when he questions how long the cultish leader will stay: “‘It’s, well, it’s about me I suppose. It’s about how I feel about myself and how I’ve felt so sad for so long and how all of this,’ she gestured around her grand bedroom, ‘doesn’t make me happy, it really doesn’t. And then David came and he’s shown me another way.’” 

While Mr. Bennet is portrayed as weak by contracting out the pursuit of his daughters’ suitors to his wife, Jane Austen is most savage in her caricature of Mrs. Bennet: “A woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper,” obsessed with the financial necessity of getting her five daughters married without a care for their future happiness. (How exactly would Mr. Collins and Lizzy work out?) Snobbish and vulgar, she ensures Jane becomes ill by sending her out in the rain to snare Bingley. But it’s her indulgence of headstrong Lydia that is seen as the most reprehensible since it threatens to bring shame on the family and means the youngest Bennet sister is stuck with caddish Wickham forever. 

“My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle.” So begins Jeanette Winterson’s ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT. Zealous and hypocritical, Mrs. Winterson beats the young Jeanette when her real mother comes to find her and locks her in the dark with no food for thirty-sex hours when she discovers Jeanette is gay. She then kicks her daughter out with the words: “You’ll have to leave. I’m not having demons here.” 

Leïla Slimani’s eponymous heroine, like Anna in Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau, has been seen as a modern Emma Bovary whose pursuit of sex compromises her ability to mother. But Adèle is far more narcissistic, and her addiction to often dangerous sex with strangers means she is all too ready to abandon three-year-old Lucien. “Lucien is a burden, a constraint that she struggles to get used to. Adèle isn’t sure where her love for her son fits in among all her other jumbled feelings: panic when she has to leave him with someone else; annoyance at having to dress him; exhaustion from pushing his recalcitrant stroller up the hill.” 

Reclusive, mercurial, obsessive, snobbish, and obsessed with appearances, Lydia Fitzsimons, manipulates her son, Lawrence, to such an extent she even drugs him to control him. “Motherhood is not a game” she proclaims at one point, adding, chillingly, “I gave birth to him, and therefore he is mine.”  

Adora Crillen, in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, is, if possible, even more self-absorbed and monstrous than Lydia. “Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother,” states Camille, the narrator and her estranged daughter. The thriller starts with a mother leaving her four young children locked in a room—“a limp sort of evil” —but Adora’s evil is more calculating, entrenched, and sustained. The victim of an abusive mother herself, the ironically named Adora takes toxic parenting quite literally. 

Alix Chamberlain in Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age is a white working mother and would-be influencer who breastfeeds her baby while speaking at women’s business forums, but begins to find her child exhausting once she starts to talk. Three-year-old Briar is “constantly asking, singing, rambling, humming, explaining that she liked hot dogs, that she once saw a turtle, that she wanted a high five, that she was not tired at all,” and Alix sticks her in front of an iPad or Netflix movie and “practically throws” her at Emira, her black babysitter, who treats the little girl with the empathy and sensitivity she requires. While Alix is satirised for her pursuit of “wokeness,” and a self-righteousness and envy that sees her meddling when Emira dates her old boyfriend, she is also reprehensible for ignoring her daughter and favoring her quiet baby over the more demanding little girl. “I don’t like it when Catherine bees the littlest favorite to Mama. I don’t like that” Briar confesses to Emira, “with a calm certainty,” in the novel’s most poignant scene. This leads Emira to tell her boss, in a go-girl showdown: “You gotta act like you like Briar once in a while. Before she like . . . really figures it out.” 

Elena Richardson, in Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, is a precursor to Alix Chamberlain, both as a textbook example of white privilege and as a mother perturbed by the emotional messiness of a less-than-perfect child. Mrs. Richardson is harshest on her youngest, Izzy, “always criticizing her behavior, always less patient with her mistakes and her shortcomings” so that “truth be told she was usually annoyed with Izzy for some reason or other.” In the Hulu miniseries, the reason for this distain is that Izzy is an “accident.” The novel is subtler, making Izzy an extremely premature baby about whom her mother continues to feel over-protective of and anxious for, causing Izzy to rebel. “Every time Mrs. Richardson looked at Izzy, that feeling of things spiraling out of control coiled around her again, like a muscle she didn’t know how to unclench. . . . Of course, the more Izzy pushed, the more anger stepped in to shield her mother’s old anxiety, like a shell covering a snail. ‘My god, Izzy,’ Mrs. Richardson said, over and over again, ‘what is wrong with you?’” 

The role of mothers in children’s literature is largely to be dead or preoccupied (think Harry Potter, Danny the Champion of the World, Swallows and Amazons, Alex Rider, Young James Bond) so that the main characters can get up to adventures undeterred. Alternatively, they can be so cruel our child protagonist has to rebel. Nose-picking Mrs. Wormwood in Matilda views her intelligent daughter as a “scab” she can’t wait to throw away. Dahl reveals a strong strain of misogyny in his depiction of the fat, bingo-playing, platinum blonde (with dark roots) who “doesn’t encourage reading books” and resorts not just to TV dinners but meals bought from the chip shop. When Miss Honey offers to bring up Matilda, she agrees with alacrity.