Mother Knows Best - our favourite fictional mamas

We’re celebrating the matriarchy, inspired by Emile Zola’s Blood, Sex and Money, the epic Rougon-Macquart family saga.

As Adelaide Fouque (Aunt Dide), Glenda Jackson is the narrator and matriarch, and splendidly terrifying she is. Here are some more of our favourites...

As recounted in My Family and Other Animals, zoologist Gerald Durrell’s mother single-handedly moved, by boat, her entire brood of unruly and ungrateful offspring from rainy Bournemouth to the sun-soaked Greek islands in a chaotic tangle of books, animals, shooting gear and cooking equipment. She spoke no Greek and relied on her beaming smile to get her through. Once established, she copes with Gerald introducing a family of scorpions on to the family dining table and filling his bedroom with bats, pigeons, tortoises and a gecko, her eldest son inviting bands of eccentric artists to stay for indefinite periods, a hypochondriac maid and an orchard filled with suitors swooning over her daughter. She is quite clearly irritated most of the time by the family’s general obstructiveness but the most she’ll ever allow herself is an exasperated "Well, really!"

Dallas’s Miss Ellie could freeze JR mid-sneer. Imagine a sort of Kris Jenner but with unruly sons instead of selfie-obsessed daughters. The matriarch of Southfork, played by Barbara Bel Geddes, is the petite blonde Miss Ellie, who has a steely resolve and an unshakeable belief in the value of family. As this is Dallas, Miss Ellie has to face alcoholism, corruption, members of her family having elaborate bouts of plastic surgery and reappearing looking entirely different amid admissions of infidelity by just about everybody. She is never without immaculate hair, twinkling blue eyes and more rocks than the Grand Canyon.

Violet Crawley, widow of Patrick Crawley, the 6th Earl of Grantham, is a chilly force of nature, like a hailstorm in a lavender hat. The matriarch of Downton Abbey, she can quell disorder or disobedience with a glance and despairs on a daily basis at lax morals, female suffrage, the lower classes and foreigners ("No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else’s house"). If the family that surround her were specifically designed to enrage her they could not do it any better – as of course, they were.

Matriarch of our very own The Archers, Jill is never without a lemon drizzle cake and some occasionally sharp words of advice. She is loyal to her children but not to a fault – when pushed she will deliver a sharp rebuke. Rows between her children seem to physically pain her and she works tirelessly for them all – baking, organising family parties and functioning as a sort of housekeeper for the Archer family in their ancestral home, Brookfield. Although she’s held in huge affection by her children, there is still trepidation when they have to break news to her she won’t like. "Mum will be so disappointed" is, on The Archers, the passive aggressive equivalent of "Mum will be absolutely furious."

A beaming smile, a dodgy hairpiece and a lot of v-neck tops, Eastenders' Peggy Mitchell was, despite barely being tall enough to see over the top of the bar, the undisputed Queen of the Queen Vic. She kept her two yobbish sons, Phil and "Gwant" in order, she had relationships with every unsuitable man in Walford, she smashed up her own bar with a baseball bat and she shouted "Get outta my pub!" at least once a week. Don’t mess.

Ada Doom is the miserly and food-obsessed matriarch of Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, who saw 'something nasty in the woodshed'. Aunt Ada holds her entirely bonkers family hostage from her bedroom in a gloomy, collapsing farm in the wilds of Sussex, giving her adult children pocket money and refusing to let them marry, threatening a breakdown if they consider it. She comes downstairs once a year for the 'counting'. Eventually, after the intervention of the bossy Flora Poste, she decides to take up aviation and glamour. She doesn’t relinquish her hold on the money, though...

From landladies to oil barons, matriarchs are the driving force of so much fiction. Maybe we need to update the old saying – behind every good drama, there’s a good matriarch.