Lynn Redgrave and James Mason in the 1966 film Georgy Girl, based on Margaret Forster’s novel. She particularly deplored book signings, with authors sent round the country in order to boost sales: she did not care, she said, if her books were bestsellers or not writers are solitary people, not performing monkeys.
She and her husband, Hunter Davies, became established writers and members of the London literati – something she did not really care for she disliked parties, although she admitted that she did make an exception for George Weidenfeld’s famous literary bashes. Third generation Margaret went to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read history. Her mother was bright, got a place in a high school and a job as a clerk – a job she had to give up as soon as she married. Her grandmother was in service and led a life of pitiful drudgery. If she had one constant preoccupation, it was the role of women in society, and in one of her most moving books, Hidden Lives (1995), she took herself and her family as prime examples of social mobility in Britain in the 20th century. She was never sure whether to be pleased or upset by the confusion. She had a singular gift, an ability to take ordinary lives and transform them into fiction of the highest order, sometimes to almost uncanny effect: in her novel Diary of an Ordinary Woman (2003) – the diary of one Millicent Price who lives through two world wars, the depression, the swinging 60s and Thatcher’s Britain – the depiction of this ordinary life was so vivid that readers were convinced that it was a real diary, edited by Forster. She was constantly searching, exploring new ideas, displaying what was one of her favourite words, “zest”.
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