In
The Submerged Plot and the Mother’s Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy
, Kelly A. Marsh examines the familiar, overt plot of the motherless daughter growing into maturity and argues that it is accompanied by a covert plot. Marsh’s insightful analyses of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone novels reveal that these novels are far richer and more complexly layered than the overt plot alone suggests. According to Marsh, as the daughter approaches adulthood and marriage, she seeks validation for her pleasure in her mother’s story. However, because the mother’s pleasure is taboo under patriarchy and is therefore unnarratable, the daughter must seek her mother’s story by repeating it. These repetitions alert us to the ways the two plots are intertwined and alter our perception of the narrative progression.   Combining feminist and rhetorical narratological approaches, Marsh’s study offers fresh readings of
Persuasion
,
Jane Eyre
Bleak House
The Woman in White
The House of Mirth
The Last September
The Color Purple
A Thousand Acres
Bastard Out of Carolina
Talking to the Dead
, and
The God of Small Things
. Through these readings,
The Submerged Plot and the Mother’s Pleasure
explores how the unnarratable can be communicated in fiction and offers a significant contribution to our understanding of narrative progression.