Women Who 'Left' Their Children: A Reading List

Women Who "Left" Their Children: A Reading List

This article relates to The White Hot

In Quiara Alegría Hudes's novel The White Hot, April Soto asks a librarian for "…any books about a mother who leaves her child." She receives in return a list of both real and fictional women who, according to the librarian, did just that, in various ways ranging from calculated murder to choosing not to raise a child under compromising circumstances.

Medea

In Greek mythology, Medea is a sorceress who plays a key role in the story of Jason and the Argonauts. She is the daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis and Idyia, an Oceanid. When Jason arrives searching for her father's Golden Fleece, the wool of the magical winged ram Chrysomallos, she chooses to marry him and subsequently helps him in his quest. In some versions of the story, this help includes murdering her brother.

In Euripides' play Medea, set years after the conclusion of the quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason leaves Medea in order to marry the young daughter of King Creon of Corinth. Devastated by this betrayal, Medea gets revenge on him by murdering their two sons, as well as his new family. The ancient Roman dramatist and philosopher Seneca also wrote a play about Medea based on the work of Euripides. Through the centuries, her story has continued to serve as inspiration for writers and artists—authors Rosie Hewlett and Eilish Quin both published novels titled Medea in 2024.

Xuela Claudette Richardson and Annie Ernaux

Xuela Claudette Richardson and Annie Ernaux, "fictional and real women, respectively," are grouped together on the librarian's list because of their shared choice to abort their pregnancies. Annie Ernaux is a celebrated French author and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, alongside many other awards. Much of her work is autobiographical, including her first book, Les Armoires Vides, published in 1974, with an English translation published as Cleaned Out in 1990. This is a fictionalized account of her experience with an illegal abortion in the 1960s.

Xuela Claudette Richardson, protagonist of Jamaica Kincaid's 1996 novel The Autobiography of My Mother, grapples with identity as a mixed-race Dominican girl in the early twentieth century. After the family friend she is sent to live with coerces her into a sexual relationship, she chooses to induce an abortion herself in order to break free of him. Though she escapes from that situation, it does not mark the end of her oppression by the intersecting forces of colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction the year after its publication.

Sethe

Sethe is the main character of the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison, published in 1987 and widely held to be one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, if not of all time. Sethe is a formerly enslaved woman living in Ohio in the early 1900s. Despite her escape from slavery, she is haunted—both literally and figuratively—by the infant daughter she killed to prevent her from being recaptured by enslavers. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Beloved in 1988.

Hansel and Gretel's Mother

The story of Hansel and Gretel is among those collected by the Brothers Grimm and first published in 1812, but it is believed to have originated in the Baltic region in the 14th century. The story and others like it may have been inspired by the widespread famine in Europe caused by the start of the Little Ice Age, which left many unable to care for their children. The plot revoves around siblings Hansel and Gretel being abandoned in the woods, but who exactly abandons them varies in the different versions. In the first recorded Grimm version, they are abandoned by their parents, while in others it is a wicked stepmother.

Joni Mitchell

When famed singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell was twenty years old, she dropped out of art school due to an accidental pregnancy. She said of the experience: "It ruined you in a social sense. You have no idea what the stigma was. It was like you murdered somebody." She married Chuck Mitchell in an attempt to make things work, but ultimately decided to put her daughter up for adoption while she was still an infant.

After the adoption, Mitchell went on to have an extremely successful musical career, including winning multiple Grammys. The adoption became public knowledge in the '90s when an old friend sold the story to the tabloids. Mitchell's daughter, Kilauren Gibb, was interested in meeting her biological mother, and the two reunited in 1997. Multiple biographies have been written on Joni Mitchell, including Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (2024) by Ann Powers.

Filed under Reading Lists

This article relates to The White Hot. It first ran in the November 19, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.