Writer best known for the novel Georgy Girl, Hidden Lives, a moving memoir about her own family, and her revealing biography of Daphne du Maurier
Margaret Forster, who has died of cancer aged 77, dedicated one of her books: “For my mother-in-law … to whom family has always been all.” The same could have been said of Forster. Her writing and her family were her life, and from them she drew her strength. Her legacy is a remarkable body of work, not only 25 novels (including Georgy Girl, made into a film in 1966) and 14 biographies, but social history, memoir, journalism.
She was constantly searching, exploring new ideas, displaying what was one of her favourite words, “zest”. 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 never sure whether to be pleased or upset by the confusion.
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. Her grandmother was in service and led a life of pitiful drudgery. 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. Third generation Margaret went to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read history.
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. 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.
Always slightly wary of the upper-middle-class milieu she found herself in, she was intensely proud of her roots. She was born in Carlisle. Her father, Arthur Forster, was a fitter in a factory, her mother, Lilian (nee Hind), a housewife, and Margaret grew up in a council house in what she called “the wrong side of the tracks”, sharing a bed with her sister in an alcove in her parents’ bedroom and longing for a room of her own. At 17 she fell in love with Davies, relieved to find that they shared a similar humble background, even though his mother did have a piano in the parlour.
They both, she wrote many years later, had ideas above their station. They hankered after what they did not have, in general and material terms. Forster’s first step on the ladder had been to win an open scholarship from the Carlisle and County high school for girls to Oxford. In the holidays, she and Davies lived together (daringly in the 50s) in a series of grim flats, but both of them knew that to escape their background meant leaving their native city. They married in 1960, left Carlisle, and moved to London. Their dream was to own their own house. It took them three years but in 1963 they found it, a late Victorian house in Dartmouth Park, north-west London. A dilapidated wreck when they bought it, it became one of many restored in a gentrified street – immaculate, full of comfort and light.
The couple had three children, Caitlin, Jake and Flora. Forster revelled in being a mother (it was the tending she loved, she once said; she wasn’t very good at playing with them) as she did in all things domestic; journalists coming to interview the distinguished author could well find her mopping the kitchen floor.
Her reputation as a writer had grown rapidly. She wrote intensely and her output was prodigious, but it was with Georgy Girl in 1965 that her reputation was secured. The story of a lumpy and lachrymose girl in search of love had immense popular appeal and was made into a successful film the following year with Lynn Redgrave in the title role.
The wit and galloping good stories of her early novels took a more serious turn in the 80s, their themes often centred on family relationships. Private Papers (1986) is an uncomfortable examination of a mother/daughter struggle and the dark side of family history; Mother, Can You Hear Me? (1979) is even more painful, a story of duty, sacrifice and filial guilt.
But perhaps Forster’s most enduring work will be that based on fact. The publisher Carmen Callil once said that Lady’s Maid (1990), the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s runaway romance told from the angle of the lady’s maid, was the best thing she had ever done. The book was not Forster’s own favourite, although she addressed the same subject in her brilliant biography Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1988), which won her the Heinemann award. Her revealing 1993 biography of Daphne du Maurier won the Fawcett book prize (and was filmed for the BBC as Daphne in 2007); she wrote the book, she said, because of a premonition – a copy of Rebecca had fallen off the shelf into her hand.
Fact into fiction became her forte, the novels based on social problems such as single motherhood, youth crime, and, most poignantly, the care of old people: having seen her much-loved mother-in-law descend into Alzheimer’s disease and watched the treatment she received, she wrote with outrage what must be one of her most memorable novels, Have the Men Had Enough? (1989). Fact as good as fiction is in the two books about her own family that have become modern classics: Hidden Lives, and its loving and honest sequel about her indomitable 90-year-old father, Precious Lives (1998).
The book that affected her most deeply was probably Significant Sisters (1984), a history of feminism. She was reluctant to take on the job; she had always thought herself at best “a feeble feminist”. The research she embarked on into the lives of women such as Florence Nightingale, Emily Davies and Emma Goldman made her feel humbled, ashamed that she had not recognised before what they had done for her. “I benefited directly and enormously from every feminist gain and I am immensely grateful that I did.”
She had, she realised, the best of both worlds; she was wife, mother, housekeeper, writer. Domesticity was a delight for her, with all its rituals of cooking, cleaning and caring. She was puritanical to a degree: she did not drive, she loved going on buses, she never watched television, and although she loved clothes – she had a simple elegance all her own – she hated the display of flesh paraded in the name of fashion. She could have a sharp tongue and she could be fierce in her condemnation of what she saw as false or ugly. But the fierceness, like the fire in her writing, concealed a deep compassion.
When she was first diagnosed and treated for breast cancer some 40 years ago, she faced the future with courage, and got on with her life and her writing. She and Davies, as devoted as they had been since they were teenagers, follow- ed a daily routine of almost Victorian rigour: they would work all morning, walk on Hampstead Heath in the afternoon, come back to work through the evening. They spent every summer at their house in the Lake District, not on holiday, but at work. “My husband and children are precious to me,” she once wrote, “but then so is my work.” She was, she said, a happy woman. Forster’s daughter Caitlin says that her mother’s heart was in Cumbria. Her last novel, How to Measure a Cow, due to be published next month, has a front cover picture of the Lake District.
In 2007, when Forster had just been diagnosed with cancer for the second time, she was stopped short by a display of her latest novel, Over, in the window of a London bookseller. But she went on to write three more more books, Isa and May (2010), The Unknown Bridesmaid (2013) and a memoir, My Life in Houses (2014).
She is survived by Davies and their children.
• Margaret Forster, writer, born 25 May 1938; died 8 February 2016
Margaret Forster | How to Measure a Cow | Chatto & Windus 9781784740665 | £14.99 | 3rd March
Tara Fraser leaves London to start a new life in a Cumbrian town selected at random. She plans to obliterate her past, which contains a shocking event that had serious consequences, by becoming a completely different personality from her previous volatile self. She is going to be quiet, even dull, and very private.
But one of her new neighbours, Nancy, is intrigued by her. She wants to become her friend. Equally determined not to be discarded are three old friends who Tara feels let her down when she most needed them.
Tara fights to keep herself to herself, but can she do it? And does she really want to? Slowly, reluctantly, she discovers the dangers of trying to suppress the past and reject other people.