grandmotherland: a 21st century roadmap

’This is an area ripe for exploration’ - Hilary Mantel

How might we better understand our travels through Grandmotherland? In this lively exploration, an experienced child psychotherapist draws together a wide range of perspectives on the role and experience of grandmothers.

Judith Edwards looks back to the past and forward to the future, while being rooted in the reality of the modern grandmother’s life. We meet ’good’ grannies, ’bad’ grannies, and all those in between, as well as women who decided to be agents of transmission in other ways than passing on their DNA.

Our guide looks at how the meme of the grandmother is affected by personality, culture, tradition and ’norms’ and considers how psychoanalytic insights may help us understand this territory of life.

Dr Judith Edwards is a retired consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist who has taught and supervised on various courses at the Tavistock Clinic, where she has worked in various capacities since the 1980s. Since retirement she has worked there as a visiting lecturer and also at Roehampton University. Her most recent publication is Psychoanalysis and Other Matters (Routledge 2019), and she has a YouTube channel ’Granny and her friends read children’s stories’- a free resource for busy parents and carers.