When Begoña Gómez Urzaiz dropped her younger son off at nursery for the first time, her friends asked her if she had cried. “A little bit,” she fibbed, not wanting to confess that her overwhelming feeling was one of gratitude and relief. For a few blessed hours she would be free to get on with her work as a journalist, without determined little hands pulling the laptop socket out of the wall and a small voice insisting that it was time to play horses.

Urzaiz, who is based in Barcelona, lied because she didn’t want to come over as anything less than a perfect mother. This is Spain, after all: a country still sluiced by what she calls “the maternal idolatry imposed by the Francoist, national-Catholic agenda”. Divorce wasn’t even legal until 1981. Yet she admits that she’s always had a sneaky appetite for stories of women who abandon their children with nary a backward glance. Not that these are necessarily easy to find, a gap that Urzaiz sets out to fill in this wide-ranging survey.

She starts with Muriel Spark, long the poster child for women who loathe and leave their kids. In 1938, Spark gave birth to Robin in Rhodesia and, as soon as wartime conditions allowed, scarpered home to Britain, leaving the child in the safe keeping of nuns. She did eventually send for her boy, only to deposit him with her parents in Edinburgh while she concentrated on nurturing her literary career in London. Novels including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means, with their lapidary construction and peptic authorial voice, could only be produced in periods of perfect concentration, the sort that is irredeemably broken when a sticky toddler insists on climbing on to your lap. Spark’s fractured bond with her son set the conditions for a lifetime of mutual loathing. As late as 1998 she was reporting that she viewed Robin, who had grown up to become a painter, with total contempt: “He’s never done anything for me, except for being one big bore.”

Spark got away with monstrous motherhood without attracting too much attention, because writers, for much of the 20th century, were not celebrities in the modern sense. It was a different matter for the Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman when, in 1949, she left her Swedish dentist husband and daughter for the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Picket-fence America was scandalised, with one stuffy senator blustering that Bergman was “a powerful influence for evil”. If he had known what she would do next then words would probably have failed him altogether. Splitting from Rossellini in 1957 (he refused to let her resume her acting career), Bergman handed her three children to nannies in Rome while she decamped to Paris with a new boyfriend.

Urzaiz works her way doggedly through the roll call of women who left their children: Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell, Gala Dalí and, the most ironic of all, Maria Montessori, the Italian doctor who made a career and a fortune out of early years education. However, by far the most interesting part of the book is the section in which Urzaiz interviews another very different kind of absent mother: economic migrants who are obliged to work abroad in order to send money to their children back home. They are from Nicaragua, Colombia and Peru – and go to Spain to find comparatively well-paid jobs in cleaning, hotel work and social care. They tell Urzaiz bleak stories of staying in touch with their children by WhatsApp and returning once every three years or so only to find themselves shrunk away from as strangers.

Compelling though this material is, it sits oddly alongside Urzaiz’s recap of public figures, not to mention her skate through fictional exemplars such as Anna Karenina, Nora Helmer or even Joanna Kramer, the character played by Meryl Streep in Kramer vs Kramer. Nor is Urzaiz’s text particularly well served by what reads as a clunky translation, ultimately giving this unusual book a disjointed and unlocated feel.