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Hidden Lives

A Family Memoir

» Margaret Forster

Penguin
Paperback : 04 Jul 1996

Synopsis

Over and over again we get told stories by our parents and grandparents, and sometimes, if these stories are treated seriously and checked, that is all they turn out to be - stories, unsubstantiated and often downright contradicted by the actual evidence in records. But sometimes beneath the stories lurks the history of more than an ordinary person. Sometimes, their story is the story of thousands ....' Margaret Forster's grandmother, Margaret Ann, died in 1936, taking many secrets to her grave. Not least was how and where she had spent the first twenty-three years of her life, which remained shrouded in mystery. What had happened then that connected her with the elegant woman in black who had paid her a mysterious and upsetting visit shortly before her death? After the funeral, there was a knock on the door. Outside stood an unknown woman claiming to be her daughter, inquiring whether anything had been left to her in the will.

These stories surrounding Margaret Forster's grandmother attained the status of family myth and in HIDDEN LIVES she looks at where the truth might lie. Why was this daughter never mentioned? How had she lived so long around the corner without acknowledgement? And why? The search for answers took Margaret on a journey into her family's past. She not only examines her grandmother's life but also the lives of her mother, Lilian, and of herself, three generations of women born and brought up in Carlisle but with radically differing circumstances and opportunities.

Margaret Ann was a domestic servant before she married a butcher and settled down to have a family. Their eldest daughter, Lily, was a bright child able to go to the Higher Grade School and get a good job as a clerk but when she married she was obliged to relinquish her career and settle down to family life. When her daughter Margaret's time came, she was able to take advantage of the changing times, to go to High School, to Oxford University and to move away from Carlisle to establish her writing career and family in the south. Three different women, three very different lives.

An enthralling piece of detective work, HIDDEN LIVES is evidence of how ordinary women lead extraordinary lives. A personal document, it also acts as a rich and fascinating commentary on how women's lives have changed over the last century.

Reviews

Critic Review:

'

Moving and beautifully written, it had me sitting up all night'
Mary Wesley in the Daily Mail

'This is a wonderful book, perhaps the best Margaret Forster has yet given us, crowning her thirty years achievement as a novelist and biographer ... her narrative has the bite and vigour of truth well told ... a slice of history to be recalled whenever people lament the lovely world we have lost'
Claire Tomalin, The Independent

'A moving, evocative account, passionate in its belief in progress, punchy as a detective novel in its story of Forster's search for her grandmother's illegitimate daughter. It also shows how biography can challenge our basic assumptions about which lives have been significant and why'
The Sunday Times

'As I read this painfully honest book, I kept finding myself saying, "yes, yes, yes" For what she does - with all the astringency and yet humane empathy she achieves in her novels - is tackle the basic dilemmas we have found ourselves in since the modern feminist revolution began in the Sixties'
The Sunday Telegraph

'Above all, Forster writes of the rituals of domesticity with intense sensual pleasure ... she has, movingly and lovingly, given shape and meaning to the unsung lives of two past generations in a masterpiece of honesty and elegance'
Valerie Grove in The Times

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