ABSTRACT
Family relationships are at the heart of Jacqueline Wilson's narratives and a notable feature of her contemporary novels. Her varied depictions of familial interaction take in sibling rivalry, parent–child conflict, bereavement, and a spectrum of organisational patterns from the hetero-normative nuclear family to arrangements involving blended families, step-parenting, single parenthood, fostering, and adoption. This chapter discusses the cultural significance of the work of this most successful children's author. It focusses on novels with a twenty-first-century setting in order to investigate how the wide range of familial patterns she explores inform the current discourse on the family and, in particular, on motherhood and the enduring notion of the maternal ‘ideal’. Drawing on socio-cultural theorists Sara Ruddick, Nancy Chodorow, John Bowlby, and Donald Winnicott, the chapter interrogates the ideological impact of Wilson's representation of the maternal subject, alongside her challenging insights into the diversity of family relationships, on the implied (usually female) middle-grade reader. It offers new perspectives on an immensely popular writer, establishing the importance of her work for its engagement in maternal and familial discourse at a powerfully illuminating level.
