The Grandmother by Božena Němcová, translated from the Czech by Susan Reynolds, Jantar Publishing, 2025

Just over two years ago, Professor Libuše Heczková, director of the Institute of Czech Literature and Comparative Studies at Charles University, Prague, delivered a seminar spotlighting the life, activism, and legacy of Milada Horáková, a Czech politician and staunch resistance member against both the Nazi Germany and Communist Czechoslovak regimes. Horáková’s advocacy was rooted in preserving democracy and women’s rights, defining a feminist as ‘a woman . . . who . . . consciously and responsibly chooses and cultivates chiefly those [qualities] in which there is a genuine, objective contribution to the broadest existing community in human society’. It is precisely this nuanced outlook which is present in Božena Němcová’s Babička, brought to us in English by Susan Reynolds as The Grandmother and released by Jantar Publishing late last year—some one hundred and seventy years after the novel’s first publication.

The Grandmother follows the life of the titular woman who leaves her natal village to go live with her daughter and her family, comprising of four children and a German, non-Czech-speaking husband. The novel’s plot is by no means linear, resembling more a collection of vignettes, with each chapter focusing on a particular episode in the characters’ lives, or imparting a story either from Grandmother’s past or from Czech legend. READ MORE…