1.
Titles have a way of coming in waves. There was a time a few years back when it seemed like vast numbers of books were being published on the subject of secret lives, as in The Secret Life of Bees, The Secret Lives of Buildings, The Secret Lives of Words, etc. Our literature seems to hold a parallel obsession with vanishing, which involves of course any number of titles involving the words “Disappear” or “Vanishing” or “Lost.”
But no trend that I’ve ever noticed has seemed quite so pervasive as the daughter phenomenon. Seriously, once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere. A recent issue of Shelf Awareness had ads for both The Sausage Maker’s Daughters and The Witch’s Daughter. I’m Facebook friends with the authors of The Hummingbird’s Daughter, The Baker’s Daughter, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, and The Murderer’s Daughters, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
I was curious to see how many of these books there actually are, so I did a search for books with “The” and “Daughter” in their titles on Goodreads. Afterward I spent some time copying and pasting all instances of The ___’s Daughter into an Excel spreadsheet. How much time? A lot, because I’m studying a foreign language, and cutting and pasting text is exactly the kind of mindless activity that can be done while I’m listening to language podcasts.
I was careful to collect only books that adhered to the “The ___’s Daughter” formula. So I didn’t include The Murderer’s Daughters, for example, or The Kitchen Daughter. Even leaving those variations out, though, and deleting any instances where the same book appeared more than once in the search results, the number of The ___’s Daughter books out there is truly staggering.
Once I went back over my spreadsheet to remove duplications, I was left with 530 titles.
But I don’t mean to suggest that five hundred and thirty represents the total number of these books. Five hundred and thirty was just the arbitrary point where I decided to stop counting, because the project was starting to take too much time. I was only on page 88 of 200 pages of search results.
2.
To be clear, I think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with calling one’s book The ___’s Daughter. I think those titles have a marvelous rhythm to them. And yet I couldn’t help but wonder why there seemed to be so many of them.
Where to begin? I could ask any of the four or five authors I know with Daughter titles, but as a general rule I hesitate to ask any author to comment publicly on either the title or the cover art of their books. These are things over which the author doesn’t necessarily have much control, and I know of at least one author whose book’s gone to press with a title that the author doesn’t particularly care for. If it should happen that an author doesn’t love the title they end up with, this isn’t something they can really talk about publicly without alienating their publisher.
No authors, then, because I don’t want to put anyone in an awkward position. I turned, as I like to do whenever a publishing-related question arises, to the booksellers. Partly because I know a lot of independent booksellers and they’re some of my favorite people, and partly because one of the things I’ve noticed about independent booksellers is that they’re much more outspoken about publishing than most people in publishing are. It’s a nice quality.
Stephanie Anderson is the manager of WORD in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She’s one of those people who probably reads more books in a month than I read in a year and knows everything there is to know about bookselling. I asked her if The ___’s Daughter books sell better than other books, or if she had any other theories about why there are so many of them. “If I have any theory about it at all,” she said…
…it’s that familiar-sounding titles drive sales because they help give readers a small feeling of comfort when they’re contemplating which book to purchase out of the thousands and thousands available. Maybe repeated words like daughter, wife, salt, etc. etc., give an overwhelmed person standing in front of a new fiction table a place to start? And it goes double for the books with the empty shoes and the headless girls in sundresses on the cover. If you’ve had a good experience with one in the past, it makes sense to try something similar on your next trip.
She’s right, there are an awful lot of headless girls in sundresses on the covers of contemporary fiction, although I hadn’t noticed the empty shoes. What I found fascinating was that she said she’d never had a customer mix up the daughters in these books’ titles. Apparently no one comes into the store looking for The Apothecary’s Daughter when they mean The Apostate’s Daughter. Her colleague Jenn Northington echoed this. “I’ve been wracking my brain,” she said, “and I can’t come up with a single time where I’ve had to do a ‘something something’s daughter’ title search.”
This might sound unremarkable, except that people come into bookstores all the time with only the faintest idea of the title they’re looking for. Stephanie told me she’s heard any number of bizarre variations on Eat, Pray, Love; no one could keep it straight. Titles can be difficult to remember, and I see evidence of this nearly every day, because I follow a lot of booksellers on Twitter. They all follow each other too, and several times a week one of them will send out an appeal for help from the book-minded Twitterverse, as in “Customer just came into the store asking for novel with the word ‘boat’ in the title. Anyone?” or “Customer looking for story collection, don’t know title or author name, but the jacket might be yellow?”
Perhaps, then, there’s something about the rhythm and construction of these titles that aids memory, which means that naming your book The ___’s Daughter is a very sensible thing to do. Perhaps the construction is so familiar that the average reader, having seen dozens or even hundreds of these titles, only really has to remember one word; perhaps at a certain point the mind plugs in The and Daughter automatically.
3.
There are a steady trickle of these titles in every decade, from the early 1900s through the present day, but my extremely unscientific and incomplete data suggests that it’s a growing trend. Just because a given set of data is wildly unscientific and woefully incomplete, does that mean it shouldn’t be graphed? No. It does not. I sorted my list of 530 titles by date and fired up PowerPoint.
Fig. 1: Books Titled The ___’s Daughter, 1990-2011
One can of course go back much further, but previous decades are less dramatic and are also probably even less complete and even more wildly unscientific.
4.
I was curious to see if women were more likely to end up with a The __’s Daughter book than men, either because they chose the title themselves or because their editors chose the title for them. This called for a pie chart.
Fig. 2: Is the author of The ___’s Daughter a man or a woman?
Sometimes it’s impossible to tell. There are authors who use initials instead of given names and maintain minimal web presences.
5.
What I found the most startling, aside from the sheer numbers, was the range of occupations, people, crimes, social classes, mythologies and attributes represented in these titles. I’m familiar with The General’s Daughter, for instance, but The Martian General’s Daughter was new to me. The identities of these daughters’ parents ranged from the relatively mundane (The Taxi Driver’s Daughter) to the wildly unexpected (The Eiffel Tower’s Daughter).
When I looked over the list, certain patterns began to emerge. I started grouping titles into categories. Some categories — academics, servants, cartographers/explorers, and political activists, for instance — turned out to be quite small, just a handful of titles in each. On the other hand, the daughters of artists and artisans— lace-makers, musicians, painters, calligraphers — were particularly well-represented, as were the daughters of people connected to royalty (dukes, kings), and magical and/or supernatural entities (devils, centaurs, demons).
A great many parents represented on the list are politicians (e.g., The Senator’s Daughter, The Governor’s Daughter), or involved in the church (The Bishop’s Daughter, The Vicar’s Daughter). There are in fact several Vicar’s Daughters. Prevailing trends in jacket art suggest that they’re especially fond of low-cut blouses, but that’s neither here nor there.
Then there’s a large group of parents that’s villainous and/or on the wrong side of the law (The Outlaw’s Daughter, The Killer’s Daughter), followed by a group employed as laborers (The Miner’s Daughter), and a group that’s affiliated with the military (The Admiral’s Daughter, The Colonel’s Daughter). A lot of them work with animals (The Rancher’s Daughter), are possibly metaphorical (The Sun’s Daughter), work in medicine (The Emergency Doctor’s Daughter), or are employed in retail (The Merchant’s Daughter).
The retailers are followed by three groups of exactly the same size: parents who do pseudo-sciencey things like astrology and alchemy (I’ll let you guess these titles), parents in law enforcement or the judiciary (The Sheriff’s Daughter, The Judge’s Daughter), and parents who are keepers of either inns or lighthouses.
The last significant group involves parents who, to put the matter as delicately as possible, probably weren’t married when their daughter was conceived (The Harlot’s Daughter, The Mistress’s Daughter).
But in case you skimmed these past few paragraphs, I have a graph for this too.
Fig. 3: Who are her parents?
E-mail
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Support the Millions
subscribe to our RSS feed
become a fan on Facebook
at 8:16 am on March 28, 2012
As far as I can remember, the first Daughter novel was Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, but I’m not sure about the publication date. I avoid Daughter books like the plague.
at 9:05 am on March 28, 2012
I hadn’t noticed the proliferation of “somebody’s Daughter” books – although I did attempt JC Oates’ The Gravedigger’s Daughter a few years back (interesting but couldn’t finish it). But I have been wondering about all the dozens of headless girls (or girls shot from the back, with a tattoo or a single braid down their spine), and the empty shoes.
The first shoe cover I remember was the paperback of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, back around 2002. It seemed unusual and fresh at the time, but since then versions of it are turning up everywhere. Somehow, I find the empty shoes much more disturbing than the torsos in sundresses.
at 10:22 am on March 28, 2012
Thank-you for the most enjoyable application of spreadsheets, pie charts and bar graphs I’ve ever seen. It’s true that once someone points out a trend in book titles or cover art you can’t help but see instances of that trend everywhere. For instance — go to your local bookstore and see how many covers depict someone walking/running/cycling/kite flying away from the reader’s gaze. Bonus points if the title is The _____’s Daughter!
at 10:31 am on March 28, 2012
You’re right, Emily. Publishers have power over titles—sometimes this is great; sometimes it’s not so great. I suppose it depends on your POV. My original title for “The Murderer’s Daughters” was ‘Adopting Adults’, and then, ‘Tricks Against Crying,’ but my editor thought TMD had more of a punch
Was it a good decision? I suppose, based on the number of articles I’ve been included in which point out the over-abundance of books with the word ‘daughter’ maybe not. Certainly getting attention for the commonplace nature of my title isn’t my dream come true. On the other hand, my title is a line from my book, where the sisters, whose father has killed their mother, are taunted by being called, “the murderer’s daughters.”
Titles are tough. I’d hate to think folks would avoid my book because of the word ‘daughter’ — as written by the gentleman above. And then there is the problem of confusion–many thought my novel was a mystery, which it is not. But my editor was probably right when she said that my original title sounded like a self-help book.
This does remind me of when I had my first daughter and named her “Sara” after a deceased family member. A year later my baby was playing in a sea of “Saras” and “Sarahs.”
Sometimes it’s commercialism. Sometimes it’s Zeitgeist.
at 10:53 am on March 28, 2012
Maybe a spreadsheet with the word “THE” should be next.
Just wanted to say The Murders’s Daughter is a fabulous book!
at 11:05 am on March 28, 2012
Surely one of the earliest examples is The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin (1836). I remember one of my Russian lit classes in college debating why he titles his book so, when it wasn’t really about her.
at 12:23 pm on March 28, 2012
There go my plan’s to write The Secret Life of the Daughter’s Daughter.
at 3:07 pm on March 28, 2012
How fun, Emily! Lately, I’ve been thinking about the titles that are sentences:
No One Belongs Here More than You,
No One is Here Except All of Us,
When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man
And Now You Can Go
We Need to Talk About Kevin
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Then We Came to the End
Not sure why these are on my mind. Maybe I need a pie chart or two!
at 3:14 pm on March 28, 2012
Please also do this for “The X’s Wife” now?!
at 3:14 pm on March 28, 2012
Oh no! I’ve been shopping my recently completed novel around–“The Surrogate’s Daughter”–I didn’t know it was part of a phenom. It’s getting lost in the title ubiquity!
at 3:26 pm on March 28, 2012
In “Wonder Boys,” the main character’s sprawling novel-in-progress is called “The Arsonist’s Daughter.” I wonder if that was a joke in reference to this phenomenon…
at 3:32 pm on March 28, 2012
There’s also, of course, the whole “What We Talk About When We Talk About ___” spin-off as well. Let’s form a Voltron-like Megazord of a book entitled “What The ___’s Daughter Talks About When We Talk About ___’s Wife.”
at 3:36 pm on March 28, 2012
This has been a joke among myself and a few Twitterers for some time now. Happy to see it spread. Thanks for doing the lifting on the figures–enjoyed the hell out of this.
at 3:45 pm on March 28, 2012
Another question/potential graph – does the noun in the title refer to the mother or father? Or both? It’s interesting that, whichever parent it is, THAT role/identity is more important than any that the daughter might have, outside of the familial context. That is the suggestion with the title. Does that bear out in the text itself?
at 6:00 pm on March 28, 2012
I’m busting my brain cells attempting to figure out how a bookseller might “rack” her brain; where on earth does she attach the ropes or chains to the cogwheels? Oh, wait! she meant “wracking”… Do I win a prize for catching the error? No? Darn!
Title’s are extremely important not only in giving a hint as to the storyline but for easy recall to stand out among the crowd. Sometimes they’ll pop out at you from the pages as you edit, other times you spend days wracking your brain for the perfect one!
Thanks for a very informative and entertaining piece!
at 7:47 pm on March 28, 2012
Thanks, Paul. Fixed.
at 8:56 pm on March 28, 2012
Excellent food for thought: thanks for a great piece.
I’ve been noticing a similar trend: The ___ of ______:
The Bookseller of Kabul
The Bastard of Istanbul
and the trend of The ___ Society / Club:
The Sunday Philosophy Club
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,
among others. I think the implications of familiarity and domesticity that “daughters” offer may also apply here.
at 9:41 pm on March 28, 2012
Last year I read the comic novel “How I Became a Famous Novelist,” and Steve Hely’s got several very funny chapters that roast these sorts of publishing cliches.
at 6:02 am on March 29, 2012
[…] had a guess, and I was right. /* Read […]
at 6:11 am on March 29, 2012
That’s brilliant. You can never have too many graphs, even unscientific ones.
I wonder how many are crime compared to romances or sagas. It’s hard to tell from the headless girls on the cover…
at 7:01 am on March 29, 2012
[…] The ___’s Daughter, Mandel spots peculiar trends in which daughters seem to turn up in these titles more frequently […]
at 8:24 am on March 29, 2012
Another interesting article. Thanks Emily!
And Edan: ““Customer looking for story collection, don’t know title or author name, but the jacket might be yellow?”
You (inadvertantly?) got it with your post on books titled with sentenced. “No one belongs here more than you” by Miranda July would probably be that yellow-jacketed story collection. That or “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” by Wells Tower. Hmm. Now that I think of it, there may be a few more to add to that list.
Personally, as a bookseller, I love helping customers who come in with the vaguest possible description of a book. Although I’m not a big fan of “I just heard it on the CBC” or “It was on TV this morning”. To those enquiries I can only respond, “I’m here, selling books. Not currently watching television or listening to the radio, so do you perhaps have a vague idea of author, title, subject or…anything?”
at 1:44 pm on March 29, 2012
This bodes well for my upcoming novel The Mother’s Daughter.
at 8:46 am on March 30, 2012
Patrick, I am laughing out loud. The other maddeningly (to me) common title is “The ______ Wife.” Which makes me think of my next book’s title, “The Husband’s Wife.”
at 10:27 am on March 30, 2012
Glad to know I’m not alone in wondering about the shoeless, decapitated daughters out there. Funny how some cliches are excoriated and others not. Thanks for the charts and the work that went into them.
PS: Randy Susan, is Tricks Against Crying out on the table now? Great title.
at 10:34 am on March 30, 2012
All this despite the fact that “daughter” is one of the least euphonious words in English: rhymes with mucky stuff like “potter”, “cotter” (pin), and “fodder.” The formula signals the (overwhelmingly female) lit-fic audience that it will be reading about a female subject.
The trend I’ve had my eye on is “How the ____ Saved Civilization / the World / America” and its fellow-traveler, “The ___ at the Heart / Edge / Top of the World.” Simon Winchester has single-handedly populated this last category to capacity.
at 12:50 pm on March 30, 2012
Unless I missed it: Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter.
at 9:18 pm on March 30, 2012
I suppose a good book to throw into the throng would be “The Viking’s Dottir”
at 9:51 am on March 31, 2012
[…] The ___’s Daughter (Emily St. John Mandel at The Millions) Even leaving those variations out, though, and deleting any […]
at 12:44 pm on April 1, 2012
This essay dovetails pretty will with Meg Wolitzer’s piece on “Women’s Fiction” in this weekend’s Times Book Review, what with the willowy girls in sundresses and all.
The “Daughter” and “Wife” tropes have been bugging me for years; my private joke is to to call them all “The Interesting Man’s Ladyfriend.” I know it’s unfair of me — at least in the “Daughter” books, the Memory Keeper or the Alchemist or the Sausage Maker could be mosthers just as well as fathers. But the point of it, and what bugs me about these titles, is that they feed a perception (accurate or not) that all these heroines can be defined only through their relationship to some male figure. The fact that most of these books seem to be marketed to an almost exclusively female audience makes it worse, to my mind. Why not simply let your heroine be the Time Traveller, or the Astronaut, or the Martian General, or even (forgive me) the Tiger?
at 5:04 am on April 2, 2012
[…] titled The ___________’s Daughter. Probably because there’s like a gazillion of them? Emily St. John Mandel did some research into the trend, which is well worth reading. I found this bit particularly […]
at 8:46 am on April 2, 2012
I would be crying if I wasn’t laughing at the fact that my new novel’s title forever was to be “The Tug Boat Captain’s Daughter” w/o any idea how often this particular construction has been used. Last time it was the bones issue. My title was “The Bones of Angels” and then that other book was published.
at 11:12 am on April 2, 2012
“Headless girls in sundresses” made me laugh out loud. I wonder sometimes if there’s a training session somewhere to teach “how to produce a book cover that makes browsers look twice.”
Titles are a headache. That’s why I deliberately chose a boring one.
at 3:50 pm on April 2, 2012
[…] The Millions, Emily St. John Mandel tabulates a silly title trend. Posted in Reading Tagged with emily st john mandel, publishing, the […]
at 12:58 am on April 3, 2012
Dig the data analysis, but would also be interested in some thoughts on why this might be such a daughter-specific phenomenon, and in what way the titles remove identity/agency from the daughters themselves.
at 8:32 am on April 3, 2012
[…] great article from The Millions about the way book titles seem to come in waves: The ______’s Daughter. Titles have a way of coming in waves… But no trend that I’ve ever noticed has seemed […]
at 3:24 pm on April 3, 2012
As Emily Pullen mentioned above, I’m much more interested in the prevalence of these titles because of what it says about the role of the daughter in these books. She is not the important one – at least, not important enough to be named. She is the progeny of whatever artist/writer/naval officer/what have you she was luck enough to be sired/birthed from.
I also think it’s funny that several, including The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Potschz are really not about the daughter at all, reinforcing the theory that this is simply a marketing ploy.
at 4:43 pm on April 3, 2012
In answer to your question, Paulette, “Tricks Against Crying” is a title I still love and hope to use (even if it was thrown over for “The Murderer’s Daughters”) for a future book.
My next book coming out is “The Comfort of Lies,” which I pray won’t make it into a table of ubiquity.
at 7:04 pm on April 3, 2012
Brian Jacoby (AT 12:23 PM ON MARCH 28, 2012) should be writing from The Secret Apostrophe Headquarters in Tallahassee –
“There go my plan’s to write The Secret Life of the Daughter’s Daughter.”
Plan’s? Hope he’s not a proofreader there
at 11:35 pm on April 3, 2012
And ditto for Paul Atreides (AT 6:00 PM ON MARCH 28, 2012) with “Title’s are extremely important…) Title’s? Hmmm.
Hoping for big sales of my upcoming book “The Pedant’s Daughter” :-)
at 9:27 am on April 4, 2012
The “The _____’s Daughter” formula does two things: immediately introduces a storyline, complexity, simply by attaching daughter to the vocation. It is more than just the most basic level noun. It also adds sensitivity and femininity, always evoking a character who watches their (father) do something laboriously, while she sits romantically and patiently, yet longingly.
at 11:52 am on April 4, 2012
You did a lot of research on this topic. Kudos!
What bugs me about all this The ____’s Daughter is that it seems to imply that the girl’s father (though I suppose it could be the mother) did something interesting, while the main character is just in the shadows, suffering the effects. It seems rather anti-feminist to me, because the girl is squeezed into a relational role (daughter) and that is what defines her. The same is true when we get The ____’s Wife.
That’s probably why I don’t read these books. It makes the fictional heroine seem passive and victimized to me, and I want more active female characters, women who actually are the calligrapher, murderer, etc.
at 11:54 am on April 4, 2012
That’s so funny that you write about this! I wrote a blog post about the very same topic back in February.
http://fromthetbrpile.blogspot.com/2012/02/all-these-daughters.html
Kudos to you for doing WAAAAY more research into the subject than I did!!
at 11:58 am on April 4, 2012
Which other books could have used this title formula? Would ‘The Hunger Games’ work as ‘The Exploded Coal Miner’s Daughter?’
What if ‘Twilight’ went by ‘The Socially Inept, Divorced Small-Town Policeman’s Daughter?’
Could J.K. Rowling have been such a success with ‘Harry Potter and the Dentists’ Daughter?’
This could be a whole new article.
at 12:31 pm on April 4, 2012
[…] Why are books with titles like The ______’s Daughter so trendy? […]
at 12:39 pm on April 4, 2012
Very interesting phenomenon — I notice that Katherine Govier’s wonderful and very successful novel The Ghost Brush, published in Canada, was re-released in the US as The Printmaker’s Daughter … obviously the US publisher was climbing aboard the trendwagon there.
at 6:22 pm on April 4, 2012
Best. Comments. Ever.
Thanks for making me laugh all evening everyone, and of course thanks to Emily for starting it all.
at 6:26 pm on April 4, 2012
PS – Remember the spate of “ist” titles? The Intuitionist, The Alienist, The Verificationist, etc.
It seems to have run its course as a trend, so there is hope for all the daughters of interesting people too.
at 9:50 pm on April 4, 2012
[…] The ___’s Daughter (The Millions, 28 March 2012) […]
at 12:48 am on April 5, 2012
[…] The ___'s Daughter What I found fascinating was that she said she'd never had a customer mix up the daughters in these books' titles. Apparently no one comes into the store looking for The Apothecary's Daughter when they mean The Apostate's Daughter. Read more on The Millions […]
at 7:54 am on April 5, 2012
Indeed! I write a webcomic set in a public library & did a strip on this phenomenon a while back: http://www.toondoo.com/View.toon?param=80839
When I read that a book called “The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter” was coming out, I thought someone was spoofing the trend. Nope. Serious book.
at 8:15 am on April 5, 2012
I thought you’d say something about [expectations of circumstance: Class, family, and gender] versus [character: Personal virtues and failings]. So, I was disappointed in that, but I liked the bar graph.
at 8:55 am on April 5, 2012
Some interesting suggestions (feel free to add yours) under the hashtag #theblanksdaughter
at 9:45 am on April 5, 2012
Oh, my word, I love this SO much. I have wondered the same thing! And I love graphs, so basically, this is heaven.
at 10:52 am on April 5, 2012
A similar thing happens with movie titles: “[Insert verb here]-ing So-and-So” ,
e.g. Drowning Mona, Saving Private Ryan, Saving Silverman, Driving Miss Daisy, Finding Nebo. Someone asked why this trend in a Wordreference.com entry, but responders had no real answer. One, however, brought up another title pattern: The ___ing of the Shrew. I guess titling is an ancient and venerable problem…
at 10:54 am on April 5, 2012
(NOT FOR PUBLISHING) Just want to be notified of future posts. SUCH an interesting blog & followup!
at 11:54 am on April 5, 2012
I eagerly read this, hoping it would be about a topic that’s annoyed me for years but, oddly, there wasn’t a mention of it in the whole piece. I’m talking about the sexism of this “The Blank’s Daughter” title pattern. My impression is that the vast majority of the Blank in these titles is the protagonist’s father, not mother. As in, identifying a female main character in terms of her relationship to a man, in this case her father. I said it’s my impression because I haven’t done the searching, cutting, pasting, counting. This writer did, yet didn’t bother to look at, or at least write about, this issue, which to my mind is the only one that actually matters. Why are publishers titling books about female main characters in terms of those characters’ fathers? A connected issue that’s also not touched on in this piece is whether there’s any parallel pattern of books titled “The Blank’s Son.” I don’t think so, but again, I haven’t done the research. I wish the writer had. If not, if, as I suspect, there is no trend toward “The Blank’s Son” titles, that too speaks volumes about the sexism of the publishing industry. Male protagonists stand on their own, are interesting in their own right, while females must be identified in relation to their fathers.
at 12:35 pm on April 5, 2012
[…] The ___’s Daughter By EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL posted at 6:00 am on March 28, 2012 56 […]
at 12:54 pm on April 5, 2012
It wasn’t that I couldn’t be bothered, “She”, it was that I’d already devoted so many dozens of hours to this project that I was in danger of falling behind on everything else (I have a day job, multiple deadlines on multiple projects, a novel coming out in four weeks, another novel in the works, etc.) and the piece was already running long.
While to your mind the feminist angle is the only angle that matters, that isn’t really the piece I was interested in writing. I was more interested in starting the conversation about the prevalence of this title construction than doing an exhaustive analysis of the potential sexism behind it. Analyzing all of these books to see which percentage of titles refer to the mother and which to the father (and why stop with these books, since I did after all only make it to page 88 of 200 Goodreads search results?) and conducting a parallel search for “The ___’s Son” would have taken months of time that I simply don’t have at my disposal.
But if this is something you’re interested in researching further and writing about, I’d be happy to email you my Excel spreadsheet. You’ll find my email address in the About section on this site.
at 6:00 pm on April 5, 2012
I’m actually not convinced that this is anti-feminism at work here. A LOT of these books are historical fiction, and through much of history, the women who play protagonists in these novels didn’t have careers or titles of their own. They are most simply introduced to the reader as someone’s wife or someone’s daughter. Also, this kind of title implies a scenario with great economy. THE MURDERER’s DAUGHTERS: who did their father/mother kill? How have they been changed by the crime? For the commonality of the structure, it is evocative.
at 4:59 am on April 6, 2012
Oh dear. I’ve been titling my work in progress “The Devil’s Daughter.” Perhaps I ought to rethink it.
To be clear, the title was not borne out of any desire to yoke my protagonist to her father’s accomplishments (he has none) or define her through her relationship to a male figure (an idea she would bristle at.) Quite the opposite. In late-Georgian slang, a “devil’s daughter” was a brash, headstrong, often aggressive woman – very similar to “hoyden.” Add that to the fact that it’s a paranormal novel in which it’s darkly hinted that the protagonist’s parents were involved in occult activity around the time of her conception and birth…and, well, I really couldn’t resist.
at 1:56 pm on April 7, 2012
When I see a cover or title that seems familiar, I get the feeling that it’s a direct reference to something in the well-read person’s train of thought — it seems complex and intelligent, something I don’t understand. I hadn’t thought of it before as a sales tactic. Thank you so much for writing about your research!
This discussion of daughters makes me think of the book covers with the backs of women’s necks http://blog.bookpassage.com/2011/02/back-of-neck-book-covers.html because of the beautiful, scary vulnerability they both suggest.
A book title depends on people’s first associations with the few words it includes. I realized that I see myself mostly as a sister. To me, “sister” suggests support, comparison, competition, mirroring. This article made me wonder how I feel if I look at myself as the computer programmer’s daughter. It doesn’t seem to me that a lot of people today see themselves first and foremost as a ___’s daughter or a ___’s son, so maybe it’s appealing because it’s an interesting perspective to think about.
I don’t think I’ve read any daughter books, but they seem to suggest exciting plots, not necessarily because of the occupation of the parent but more because of the fact that there’s a daughter involved. Involving a daughter seems to suggest a clean slate (like the back of neck covers or the tender skin under a blister), the fear or hope that the parent’s occupation or behaviors will impact the daughter, the possibility that the daughter will become strong and rise up or outdo or be ruined by her parent. Sounds like an exciting plot. If the story is not about the daughter, maybe the title asks the reader to consider resonation of the parent’s actions in a fuller way — I guess I’m trying to figure out some reasons that people might be drawn to titling their books this way since so many people have made this choice.
Thanks for the fun article and discussion!
at 7:24 am on April 8, 2012
The Officer’s Daughter is an awfully good novel about the eponymous Daughter’s tribulations following the German/Russian invasion of Poland in 1939. She is sent into the Gulag and escapes with the remnants of the Polish army to Persia, where she marries a Tehran doctor. The book is entirely about the Daughter; The Officer is only a shadowy figure at the beginning of the book, and a wrecked old man when she visits communist Warsaw in her furs after the War. So if the title be deceptive in this case, it’s only that it suggests more about the Officer than the Daughter. The author is Zina Rohan. I bought my copy second-hand, so I think it’s out of print. Blue skies! — Dan Ford
at 3:37 pm on April 9, 2012
Fascinating! I recently re-edited my historical saga THE TEA PLANTER’S LASS as an ebook – and changed her from a LASS into a DAUGHTER! I had a vague feeling it might be a more universal title, so it’s really interesting to read of your research. I had no idea there were so many daughters around. Would a TEA PLANTER’S DAUGHTER swell the modest ranks of ‘retail’ daughters, I wonder? Or can she kick-start a ‘women in business’ grouping?!
Thanks for an entertaining article.
Janet
at 12:44 pm on May 14, 2012
[…] May 14 2012, 12:08 PM by Eugenia Williamson Remember when every novel was called The ______________'s Wife or The ___________'s Daughter? Well, now it's orphans. A hardcover copy of The […]
at 7:29 am on May 15, 2012
It’s now official: I have a cover design for Poland’s Daughter, though the book is still a ways from publication. I have however published three chapters as 99-cent downloads for Amazon’s Kindle reader.
at 6:23 am on May 30, 2012
[…] Mai departe, urmează The Millions, unul dintre site-urile noastre preferate, care, pe lângă faptul că ne atrage atenţia asupra altor materiale faine postate prin toate colţurile internetului – deci de acolo ai toate şansele să migrezi spre alte locuri interesante – publică deseori eseuri extrem de bine scrise, pe tot felul de teme la care puţini dintre noi ne-am gândi, de la criza romanului de dragoste al timpurilor moderne, până la titluri care se construiesc pe sintagma “fiica cuiva“. […]
at 2:12 pm on June 11, 2012
Actually, Paul Atreides is wrong. The primary spelling of “to rack one’s brains” in the dictionary is without the w, and if you look up the etymology of the word, it actually *does* connect to the medieval torture device:
wrack (n.)
late 14c., “wrecked ship,” probably from M.Du. wrak “wreck,” cognate with O.E. wræc “misery, punishment,” and wrecan “to punish, drive out” (see wreak). The meaning “damage, disaster, destruction” (in wrack and ruin) is from c.1400, from the O.E. word. Sense of “seaweed, etc., cast up on shore” is recorded from 1510s. The verb meaning “to ruin or wreck” (originally of ships) is recorded from 1560s, from earlier intrans. sense “to be shipwrecked” (late 15c.). Often confused in this sense since 16c. with rack (1) in the verb sense of “to torture on the rack;” to wrack one’s brains is thus erroneous.
from http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=wrack&allowed_in_frame=0
at 3:21 pm on June 13, 2012
[…] My biggest title pet peeve. […]
at 3:09 pm on September 23, 2012
[…] awhile ago on Twitter, I linked to an article that satisfyingly applied charts and graphs to my pet peeve of book titling, “The […]
at 12:55 pm on November 14, 2012
and one more for the record: The Abortionist’s Daughter.
http://www.amazon.com/Abortionists-Daughter-Elisabeth-Hyde/dp/0307276414
at 12:54 pm on December 5, 2012
[…] and Canada, read a book that takes place in the country you were born. 15: Read a book titled The _______’s Daughter or The _______’s Wife. 15: Read a book that was originally written in a language other […]
at 2:22 pm on January 1, 2013
[…] points: Read a book titled The _______‘s Daughter or The _______’s Wife. […]
at 6:01 am on January 21, 2013
[…] any of you read this article on The Millions last year, you’ll know that I can’t be the only one getting a little […]
at 10:42 pm on February 12, 2013
[…] like “The X’s Wife” or “The X’s Daughter” (take a look at this great article on The Millions). These titles tend to irritate me a bit, as they define the main female character […]
at 2:55 pm on February 27, 2013
[…] to me was that out of all the “X’s Relation Here”, Daughter was the most popular. This post also has a few more interesting statistics on the subject. I find it interesting that […]
at 3:00 pm on May 22, 2013
[…] awhile ago on Twitter, I linked to an article that satisfyingly applied charts and graphs to my pet peeve of book titling, “The ___’s […]
at 9:41 pm on August 9, 2013
[…] this post by Emily St. John Mandel didn’t exist when I posted the below, but is a much better analysis […]
at 10:49 am on August 12, 2013
[…] title. You know: The Vet’s Daughter, The Apothecary’s Daughter, and so forth. This writer noticed, and has fully charted the trend. The data she’s amassed is simultaneously incredibly thorough and incredibly entertaining. I […]
at 12:23 pm on September 12, 2013
It seems like you’ve overlooked something in #1… How many book titles have the format “The _______’s Son” or “The ________’s Husband”? It is probably safe to assume that not nearly as many of those exist, but I feel that your point wouldn’t really be complete without at least looking into it. It might be as simple as just running a similar search… If the male version of that search turns up only 20 pages of results, there’s your answer.
at 12:55 pm on February 5, 2014
Have you considered sharing the Excel spreadsheet you created? I’d be very curious to see all of the many title variations!
at 9:48 am on August 5, 2014
[…] years ago, Emily St. John Mandell wrote a much better piece than mine for The Millions that focused specifically on the “daughter” titles. It includes […]
at 10:38 am on October 31, 2014
Thank you for the fun article, Emily. I wonder if the trend has abated by now, two years later … This is for She, if She is still around … the second thing I thought of while scrolling thru the comments was the story of Jephtha the Gileadite’s Daughter in the Book of Judges in the Torah. I believe you’re right about the sexist origins of The ___________’s Daughter. The story of The Gileadite’s Daughter ends like this: “From year to year the daughter of Israel went to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite, four days in a year.” This woman is remembered by an annual 4-day event, yet she has no name.
at 2:43 pm on May 13, 2015
[…] The Millions post which discloses this repetitive state of affairs dates from 2012, so who knows what may have happened since then. Strangely I cannot recall ever seeing or reading a book with a title in this pattern, though I seem to remember a book called The Handmaid’s Daughter. I guess I may have seen that one, or at least a review of it. But of course the academic world in which most of my publishing career was spent would be unlikely to come up with titles like this. […]
at 6:52 pm on May 15, 2015
[…] books, and writes for The Millions (I can particularly recommend her essay on book titles “The ___’s Daughter“, because things like trends in book titles excite me. Also there are […]
at 5:07 pm on May 24, 2015
Thoroughly enjoyed reading this, but was disappointed to see my own book go unmentioned (The Profiler’s Daughter). I picked the title after watching the movie Wonderboys, wherein the protagonist has secured a teaching position based on his breakout novel, The ____ ‘s Daughter (sorry, can’t remember!). When I was trying to come up with a title for my manuscript, The Profiler’s Daughter was the only title my daughter liked. So I went with it. And I can’t help noticing that many of the titles you mention were published in 2012, as was mine. Also, that most were highly rated. Can’t argue with that.
at 10:07 pm on August 14, 2015
I’m currently reading “The Weedkiller’s Daughter” by Harriette Simpson Arnow, published in 1969. That’s seems to be a pretty early example based on the titles mentioned here. It is the first and I hope last “The ___’s Daughter” book I ever read. Those titles have always stood out to me and seemed annoying.
2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
Best of the Millennium; Readers' List
A new way to browse The Millions! Books and Reviews
Bookmark these links to stay on top of the hottest books:
Hot 100 | Awards | Movers & Shakers | Bargain Books | Kindle Bestsellers
More From Essays
More From Notable Articles
Other Recent Articles
Recent Comments
Support The Millions Each Month
Learn More
2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
Readers' List
© Mmix The Millions. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a cc attribution-noncommercial-Sharealike 2.5 License.