The Virago book of grandmothers - Penelope Farmer

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'...