About the Author and the Text

J. B. Priestley (John Boynton Priestley, 1894-1984) was a well-known English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He wrote a great many plays and essays, often mixing warm humour with sharp social comment on ordinary middle-class English life.

Mother's Day is a short, humorous one-act play written in the 1950s. It is a light-hearted but pointed look at the status of the mother inside her own family. Mrs Annie Pearson is a gentle, hard-working housewife whose husband and two grown-up children take her completely for granted — they order her about, expect meals and chores on demand, and give her no thanks or respect. Her spirited neighbour, the fortune-teller Mrs Fitzgerald, comes up with an unusual remedy: through a magic spell the two women exchange personalities (and bodies), so that the bold Mrs Fitzgerald, now in Mrs Pearson's body, can teach the selfish family a much-needed lesson. The play uses this fantastic device to make a serious point through comedy — that a mother is a person with her own rights, not an unpaid servant.