Diary of an Ordinary Woman - Hardcover

Forster, Margaret

4.13

1,382 ratings by Goodreads

9780701174125: Diary of an Ordinary Woman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701174129 ISBN 13: 9780701174125

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2003

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Millicent King may seem to be an 'ordinary' woman - but actually she's not ordinary at all, and what's more she lives through the extraordinary events of the 20th century. Presented as the 'edited' journal of a real-life woman who was born in 1901 and died in 1995, this is fiction where every word rings true. Millie starts her diary at the age of 13, on the eve of the Great War. With vividness and a touching clearsightedness 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...She 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 teaching, social work and war work in the thirties. She has lovers and secret lovers, ambition and conviction. But then her life is turned upside down first by the death of her sister, leaving two small orphaned children for her to care for, and then by the death in a prison camp of the only man she ever truly loves. Here is quintessential twentieth-century woman brilliantly seen in close-up - independent, prickly, vulnerable, determined, coping with the large and small tragedies and upheavals of the century, and making it through. A triumph - not to mention, a brilliantly clever piece of 'memoir' writing which could have everyone fooled.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

'.a beautifully crafted novel. Forster is as distinguised a biographer and memoir-writer as she is a novelist. .' -- Daily Telegraph. March 1, 2003

'Diary of an Ordinary Woman is certainly more gripping and more immediate than many novels..Forster has pulled off an imaginative feat.' -- Literary Review. March 2003

'Equally at home with memoir, fiction or biography, Margaret Forster has here produced a hybrid of all three.... richly textured and highly enjoyable.' -- Times Literary Supplement. March 7, 2003

'Once the reader is ensnared...the book remains irresistable. Utterly captivating and quite...quite extraordinary.' -- Manchester Evening News. March 1, 2003

'There is a pace and momentum to this book which keeps you reading. It may be fiction but it's also convincingly, tragically and often exhilarating-real life.' -- Independent on Sunday. March 9, 2003

Book Description:

'I rushed through this novel and enjoyed it enormously - what she experienced in her very "ordinariness" was shared by thousands of real women of her generation' Val Hennessey, Daily Mail

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.