JMW Turner’s mother deserves respect and understanding too

Dr Melissa L Gustin, the curator of British art at National Museums Liverpool, sits in front of a painting by JMW Turner during a press preview for Turner: Always Contemporary. Photograph: Adam Vaughan/EPA

I’m glad we’re starting to look at historical figures through the lens of neurodivergence (Documentary explores whether JMW Turner may have been neurodivergent, 10 November). But why give JMW Turner the benefit of 21st-century advances in neuroscience and not afford the same courtesy to his mother, Mary, who was “believed to have had a psychiatric disorder and would fly into a dangerous temper”? This language could have come straight from the admission papers that got her committed to a mental asylum.
Jill Metcalfe
Bottens, Switzerland

• Delighted to learn from Claire Ratinon that our rewilded garden is full of volunteer plants, not weeds (Had a bad year? Embrace ‘volunteer crops’, your garden’s gift to you, 7 November). Like her, we have welcomed a surprise crop of squash and tomatoes, and a glut of raspberries, as well as animals.
Linda Morris
Southport, Merseyside