BOOKS Dear Book Doctor, I’m about to go on maternity leave. Will anyone remember me or take me seriously when I return?
BD, London
Be grateful that’s your biggest fear. In literature, getting pregnant crushes more lives than it crowns. Caddy’s pregnancy in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury ruins the prospects of all around her; an affair in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables leaves Fantine abandoned with a baby in Paris.
Maternity leave actually post-dates most novels – in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, for example, a woman hides her expanding belly so as not to be sacked.
Will your comrades miss you? In reality, absence rarely makes the heart grow fonder. For every faithful Penelope, waiting years for her beloved to return, there are plenty more fickle Emma Bovarys, interested in newer arrivals.
Your real concern, though, may be that you will miss your colleagues and your job. “Every man’s work ... is always a portrait of himself,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh. A century later and Butler might have added that work gives women satisfaction too.
However, motherhood is perfect preparation for a triumphant return to employment . According to Helen Simpson’s Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, parent politics are the toughest kind. “Look at her nails,” one woman says of another, “you can always tell. Painted fingernails mean a rubbish mother.”
If you can steer your way through the modern mummy world, your old workplace will seem like child’s play.
This is the final book doctor column
