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Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle in 1938, and educated at the Carlisle and County High
School for Girls.
From here she won an Open Scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford where in
1960 she was awarded an honours degree in History. The day after she finished her final exams,
she married Hunter Davies, whom she met and fell in love with at the age of 17.
Since 1963 Margaret Forster has worked as a novelist, biographer and freelance literary critic, contributing regularly to book programmes on television, to Radio 4 and various newpapers and magazines. |
Her recent best selling works include the biography of Daphne du Maurier, a memoir of her own family, 'Hidden Lives', and the novel 'The Memory Box'.
'Hidden Lives' is Margaret Forster's biography of her grandmother, her mother and herself. The story starts in working class origins in Carlisle, and mirrors the fortunes of three generations of British womanhood. 'Precious Lives' is about the death of her father and her sister-in-law, both from Carlisle. 'Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin' tells the story of the Carr family, a Quaker family who set up a biscuit making business in Carlisle which became one of the largest baking businesses in Britain.
Recently, her novels have tended to be based strongly in fact - "I'm always writing about family relationships, what family means and the way duty and love are all mixed up."
She lives half the year in London and half in the Lake District, and is married to the writer Hunter Davies. They have three children, Caitlin, Jake and Flora.
Books by Margaret Forster:
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Diary of an Ordinary Woman
- Mar 2004, Minerva; ISBN: 0099449285. The diary of fictional character Millicent Price, who lives through the Great War, the General Strike, the Depression era of the 30's, the War, and then the Swinging Sixties, Greenham Common and Maggie Thatcher's Britain. |
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Have the Men Had Enough
Vintage, 2004, ISBN 0099455641 'Mercilessly exact and unsentimental about the desolation of old age and the barnacles of family life ... it is a moving love story, a condemnation of the way we treat our old friends and loves, a rage against the dying of the light' - Philip Howard in The Times. |
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Mother Can You Hear Me ?
Vintage, 1981 (2004), ISBN 0099455587 Angela Bradbury's mother certainly makes the most of life's disappointments - in those endless insidious sacrifices bravely borne, for which her children can never be quite grateful enough. Even now, just one phone call from Mother can send Angela into a maelstrom of complicity, guilt and regret. And her own daughter, Sadie, has developed into a scornful, slovenly, selfish adolescent. It seems that motherhood is a heritage of broken promises. But Angela is determined that, somehow, her relationship with Sadie will be different. |
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Hidden Lives
Penguin, 1996, ISBN 0140239820 A memoir of Margaret Forster's grandmother and mother which reflects on the changes in women's lives - about sex, family, work - across three generations. It is 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. Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times |
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Good Wives
Vintage, October 2001, ISBN 0099283778. It looks at the lives of three women over the centuries: Mary Livingstone - wife of David, Fanny Stevenson - wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jenny Lee - wife of Aneyen Bevin, and also Margaret Forster's own married life, to show the changing values in marital bliss. |
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Shadow Baby
Penguin, 2000 (1996), ISBN 0140258361 Evie, born in 1887, is left to make her own way in the world when her mother, Leah, is offered the chance to better herself. Shona, born in 1956, has a happy childhood, but, like Evie, she desires that special love only a real mother can provide. Both mothers fear revelation, both daughters seek emotional recompense. |
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The Memory Box
Penguin 2000 (1999), ISBN 0140284117 A dying woman leaves a sealed box for her baby daughter. Years later, as a young woman, the daughter Catherine finds the mysterious box, addressed to her, full of unexplained objects, and she starts to unpack the story of a woman whom she never knew, but who has cast a shadow over her life. |
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The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury
Penguin, 1978, ISBN 0140043632 Rose and Stanley Pendlebury, ageing and alone in their antiquated Islington house, have a relationship based on mutual tolerance. Rose, 'brittle as thin toffee', finds the whole world an offence. Until, gradually, reluctantly, she allows her neighbours - especially their delightful toddler Amy - to prove that she is not too old for friendship and hope. |
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Lady's Maid
Penguin, 1991, ISBN 0140147616 'Compulsively readable ... at each climax of the story, from the Brownings' runaway romance to her own equally compromised and complicated marriage, the lady's maid speaks directly and at the last most movingly' - The Guardian |
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Vintage/Ebury, 1998, ISBN 0099768615 The story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning has become part of literary mythology - the invalid kept locked up in Wimpole Street by a tyrannical father until her elopement and flight at the age of 40. This biography introduces the reader to a strong and determined Elizabeth Barrett. |
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Precious Lives
Vintage 1999 (1998), ISBN 0099275740 A follow-up to 'Hidden Lives', this account takes up the story of Margaret Forster's gritty northern father. He was not a man to answer questions - last of all about life and death - so the author attempts to answer them for herself as she looks back at her father's life and indomitable character from the perspective of his ninth decade, evoking incidents from her Cumbrian childhood, his working life and stubborn old age, trying to make sense of their largely unspoken relationship, and of his tenacious hold on life and his family. |
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Mother's Boys
Penguin, 1995, ISBN 0140241809 The attack on fiftenn-year-old Joe Kennedy was particularly squalid and vicious. Sheila Armstrong's grandson Leo was found holding the knife. Harriet Kennedy cannot cope with her son's continuing pain; Sheila, who reared Leo, cannot bear the lasting guilt, In a moving tale of suffering and forgiveness, the two women confront the complex range of emotions that motherhood entails. |
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Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin
Vintage, 1998 (1997), ISBN 0099748916 This tells the story of the Carr family, a Quaker family who set up a biscuit making business in Carlisle which became one of the largest baking businesses in Britain. It reveals the hidden lives behind the history of the great 19th Century manufacturing middle-class. |
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Georgy Girl
Penguin, 1978, ISBN 0140043640 Made into a successful film that starred Lynn Redgrave and Charlotte Rampling, Georgy Girl is a sharp, affectionate and very funny portrait of a large, lachrymose and self-confessed ugly duckling, who pursues the chimera of true love, only to find that there are other alternatives in life. |
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Private Papers
Penguin, 1987, ISBN 0140092668 'A brilliant, sometimes terrible novel about the generation war within a family, as witty and cool as it is heart-rending' - Auberon Waugh in The Daily Mail. |
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Daphne Du Maurier
Arrow, 1994, ISBN 0099333317 'Rebecca' captured the popular imagination as few other 20th-century novels have done. But almost no one was aware that this novel and the other passionate even violent stories which made Daphne du Maurier a house-hold name mirrored her own fantasy life. She maintained a charming facade, while underneath there was emotional turbulence and ambiguity. Margaret Forster explores - with the co-operation of the family and access to revealing unpublished letters - Daphne's relationship with her father, her marriage to 'Boy' Browning, her secret wartime love affair, and her highly significant friendship with Gertrude Lawrence. |
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The Battle For Christabel
Penguin, 1992, ISBN 0140148930 Rowena wants a baby. What she doesn't want is the baby's father. Yet five years after the birth of Christabel, Rowena is dead, tragically killed in a climbing accident. The battle for Christabel has begun. |
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Significant Sisters - The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1838-1939
Penguin, 1986, ISBN 0140081720 Significant Sisters traces the lives and careers of eight women, each of whom pioneered vital changes in the sphere of law, education, the professions, morals or politics. Each forged her own particular brand of feminism, yet all engaged in the battle against the injustices and limitations imposed upon women's freedom. |
Dames Delight
The Bogeyman
Panther 1970, ISBN: 058602266X
The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff
The Park
Miss Owen-Owen is at Home
Fenella Phizackerley
Mr Bone's Retreat
The Bride of Lowther Fell
Marital Rites
The Rash Adventurer: The Rise and Fall of Charles Edward Stuart
A biography of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
William Makepeace Thackeray: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman
Chatto and Windus are part of Random House, email enquiries@randomhouse.co.uk.
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