Diary of an Ordinary Woman
Margaret Forster, 2003
Random House UK
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780099449287
Summary
Millicent King is an "ordinary" woman living through extraordinary times in this brilliantly conceived piece of fictional memoir writing.
Diary of an Ordinary Woman is the edited diary of fictional woman Millicent King (1901-1995). From the age of 13, on the eve of the Great War, Millicent King keeps her journals in a series of exercise books. The diary records the dramas of everyday life in an ordinary English family touched by war, tragedy and money troubles in the early decades of the century. With vividness, she records her brother's injury, her father's death from pneumonia, the family's bankruptcy, giving up college to take a soul-destroying job as a shop assistant.
Millicent struggles to become a teacher, but wants more out of life. From Bohemian literary London to Rome in the twenties, her story moves on to social work, the General Strike, the Depression Era of the 1930's and the build-up to the Second World-War in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London. This is followed by her experience of the Swinging Sixties and Maggie Thatcher's Britain.
She has proposals of marriage and secret lovers, ambition and optimism, but her life is turned upside down by wartime deaths. Here is 20th-century woman in close-up coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives. Her ordinary life proves unexpectedly absorbing and, at times, extremely moving showing that, above all, the most ordinary lives are often extraordinary. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 25, 1938
• Where—Carlisle, England, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in London and the Lake District, England
Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle, England, 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 she was awarded an honours degree in History. After her exams she married the writer Hunter Davies, whom she met and fell in love with at the age of 17.
She became a schoolteacher in Islington, North London (between 1961-63) briefly before embarking on a writing career. She first achieved fame in 1965 with her second book, Georgy Girl which was made into a film starring Lynn Redgrave and Michael Caine. 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 newspapers and magazines. She was a member of the BBC Advisory Committee on the Social Effects of Television from 1975-77 and of the Arts Council Literary Panel from 1978-81, as well as the chief non-fiction reviewer for the London Evening Standard from 1977-80.
She is the author of the bestselling memoirs, Hidden Lives (a memoir of her own family) and Precious Lives. Her acclaimed biographies include the biography of Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Among Forster's many successful novels are Lady's Maid, Private Papers, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, and The Memory Box.
She and her husband, the writer Hunter Davies, have three children. The couple lives half the year in London and half the year at their cottage in the Lake District. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A highly enjoyable read: well-informed, gripping...an overview of the period seen from the underside
Sunday Telegraph
Not only is the background of social and political change meticulously accurate...but there is everything one would expect from a well-kept diary. This is fiction: yet it is true
Guardian
A beautifully crafted novel about the cost of war... Forster is as distinguished a biographer and memoir - writer as she is a novelist. She is an old hand at making a story out of the fragments of a life
Daily Telegraph
We believe in Millicent whole-heartedly and come to love her - she has a heroism that George Eliot would recognise. It may be fiction, but it's also - convincingly, tragically and often exhilaratingly - real life
Independent on Sunday
A richly textured, skilfully structured and highly enjoyable novel by an experienced writer at the peak of her powers
Times Literary Supplement
Discussion Questions
1. "I'm always writing about family relationships, what family means and the way duty and love are all mixed up."
Forster's novels often reveal the theme that love within the family becomes blurred with a sense of duty for her female characters. Discuss the idea that family pressures put a sense of obligation upon Millicent's life and that her life is restricted by her sex and the period in which she grows up (and the limitations upon women in this period).
2. A 98-year-old woman contacted Margaret Forster to propose that Forster edit her diaries for publication. She had kept a continuous record of her life from 1914-1995. Margaret Forster never did meet the woman in question, she cancelled their meeting because of family objections. Forster decided to pretend she had obtained and read the diaries. The result is a fictionalised memoir. How authentic do you find Forster's diary in light of the fact it is a "fictionalised memoir"? You may wish to look at the diary in terms of both the private life of Millicent (ie her fears, worries, joys and insecurities — do these seem real?) and the public life beyond her world. Does the social, political and historical background of change within the novel seem realistic?
3. After the first few diary entries, Margaret Forster describes Millicent as "outspoken, quite selfish, restless, ambitious and inclined to self-pity." How much does Millicent's personality change throughout the years? Do events and circumstances change her character? Discuss Millicent's personality and how it develops from her earliest diary entries and life as a young girl, right up until her last entries as an old woman.
4. Discuss the difference between Millicent and other women of her time. Do you see her as a modern woman with both her career and her views on pre-marital sex? You may wish to compare and contrast her with other women in her diary, perhaps above all with her sister, Tilda. How do their views differ?
5. Discuss the diary method as a form of narrative structure. Does it provide us with the necessary elements to create an interesting and absorbing story? What is your view of Margaret Forster's authorial interventions between the entries? Are these necessary to give us another viewpoint and voice aside from Millicent's own? What do these add to the novel?
6. "There was nothing ordinary about this woman. Indeed, I now wonder if there is any such thing as an ordinary life at all."—Introduction to Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Margaret Forster .... Forster's work cast light upon depths of difficulties of apparently ordinary lives. Discuss how Millicent's life is both ordinary (in that she goes through many of the same experiences of other women living in the war years) and extraordinary. Is Millicent herself extraordinary, or is it simply that the events she lives through make her so?
(Questions issued by publisher.)