Margaret Forster

Margaret Forster (born May 25, 1938) is a British author. She was born in Carlisle, England, where she attended Carlisle County High School, and then went on to read history at Somerville College, Oxford. After a short period as a teacher in the London Borough of Islington (1961-1963), she has worked as a novelist, biographer and freelance literary critic, contributing regularly to book programmes on television, to BBC Radio 4 and various newspapers and magazines. She famously said of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy that it was "of entirely dubious literary merit."[1]

She is the author of many successful novels, including Georgy Girl (filmed in 1966 and adapted for a short-lived 1970 Broadway musical), Lady's Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Have the Men Had Enough? and The Memory Box, two memoirs, Hidden Lives and Precious Lives, and several acclaimed biographies, most recently Good Wives and Keeping out the world. She wrote Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin, an account of the Carr's biscuit factory in Carlisle.

Precious Lives won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography in 1999. Forster is married to the writer Hunter Davies and their daughter Caitlin is also a novelist.

Bibliography

Fiction

• 1964 Dames' Delight (Jonathan Cape)
• 1965 The Bogeyman (Secker & Warburg)
• 1965 Georgy Girl (Secker & Warburg)
• 1967 The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff (Secker & Warburg)
• 1967 A Girl called Fathom (Heinemann)
• 1968 The Park (Secker & Warburg)
• 1969 Miss Owen-Owen is at Home (Secker & Warburg)
• 1970 Fenella Phizackerley (Secker & Warburg)
• 1971 Mr Bone's Retreat (Secker & Warburg)
• 1974 The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury (Secker & Warburg)
• 1979 Mother Can You Hear Me? (Secker & Warburg)
• 1980 The Bride of Lowther Fell: a Romance (Secker & Warburg)
• 1981 Marital Rites (Secker & Warburg)
• 1986 Private Papers (Chatto & Windus)
• 1989 Have the Men Had Enough? (Chatto & Windus)
• 1990 Lady's Maid (Chatto & Windus)
• 1991 The Battle for Christabel (Chatto & Windus)
• 1994 Mother's Boys (Chatto & Windus)
• 1996 Shadow Baby (Chatto & Windus)
• 1999 The Memory Box (Chatto & Windus)
• 2003 Diary of an Ordinary Woman 1914-1995 (Chatto & Windus)
• 2005 Is There Anything You Want? (Chatto & Windus)
• 2006 Keeping the World Away (Chatto & Windus)
• 2007 Over (Chatto & Windus)

Biography & History

• 1973 The Rash Adventurer: the rise and fall of Charles Edward Stuart (Secker & Warburg)
• 1978 Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman: William Makepeace Thackeray (Secker & Warburg)
• 1984 Significant Sisters: the Grassroots of Active Feminism 1839-1939 (Secker & Warburg)
• 1988 Elizabeth Barrett Browning: a biography (Chatto & Windus)
• 1993 Daphne du Maurier (Chatto & Windus)
• 1997 Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin: a Family and Their Times 1831-1931 (Chatto & Windus)
• 2001 Good Wives?: Mary, Fanny, Jennie & Me 1845-2001 (Chatto & Windus)
• 2004 'Du Maurier , Dame Daphne (1907–1989)', [entry in] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [online ed.] (Oxford University Press)

Family Memoirs/Autobiography

• 1995 Hidden Lives: a Family Memoir (Viking)
• 1998 Precious Lives (Chatto & Windus)

Literary editions

• 1984 Drawn from Life: the Journalism of William Makepeace Thackeray (Folio Society)
• 1988 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Selected poems (Chatto & Windus)
• 1991 Virginia Woolf, Flush: a biography (1933) New intro. by Margaret Forster (Hogarth Press)

Criticism & Biography of Margaret Forster

• Bordelon, David, 'Margaret Forster', in Twentieth Century Literary Biographers (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol.155) (Deroit: Gale, 1995), pp. 76-87
• 'Forster, Margaret', in The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed.rev.,ed. Margaret Drabble. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
• Greenstreet, Rosanna, 'My perfect weekend: Margaret Forster', The Times, 19 December 1992 [Interview]
• 'Margaret Forster', in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol.149 (Detroit: Gale, 2002), pp 62-107
• 'Margaret Forster', in Contemporary British Novelists, ed. Nick Rennison (London: Routledge, 2005)
• Moseley, Merritt, 'Margaret Forster' in British and Irish Novelists since 1960 (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol.271) (Deroit: Gale, 2003), pp. 139-155
• Patterson, Christina, 'A life less ordinary: Margaret Forster worries, after 30 books, that she loves writing too much', The Independent, 15 March 2003, 20-21 [Interview]
• Taylor, Annie, 'The difference a day made (14 May 1957) ...Margaret Forster was on a mission', The Guardian, 6 June 1996 [Interview]

External links

• Lindsay, Cora, 'Critical perspective [and biog & bibliog. on Margaret Forster' Contemporary Writers (British Council)
• Margaret Forster at Random House (publisher's website)