Search results for ""Author Margaret Forster""

Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster was the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady's Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want? , Keeping the World Away, Over and The Unknown Bridesmaid. She also wrote bestselling memoirs Hidden Lives, Precious Lives and, most recently, My Life in Houses and biographies. She was married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lived in London and the Lake District. She died in February 2016, just before her last novel, How to Measure a Cow, was published.

Read more less

‘Compelling…taut and suspenseful’ GuardianTara Fraser has a secret. Desperate to escape herself and her past, she changes her name, packs up her London home and moves to a town in the North of England where she knows no one. But one of her new neighbours, Nancy, is intrigued by her. And as hard as Tara tries to distance herself, she starts to drop her guard. Then a letter arrives. An old friend wants to meet up. Struggling to keep her old life at bay, Tara soon discovers the dangers of fighting the past.

Read more less

Lost, found, stolen, strayed, sold, fought over... This engrossing, beautifully crafted novel follows the fictional adventures, over a hundred years, of an early 20th-century painting and the women whose lives it touches. It opens with bold, passionate Gwen, struggling to be an artist, leaving for Paris where she becomes Rodin's lover and paints a small, intimate picture of a quiet corner of her attic room.Then there's Charlotte, a dreamy intellectual Edwardian girl, and Stella, Lucasta, Ailsa and finally young Gillian, who share an unspoken desire to have for themselves a tranquil golden place like that in the painting.Quintessential Forster, this is a novel about women's lives, about what it means and what it costs to be both a woman and an artist, and an unusual, compelling look at a beautiful painting and its imagined afterlife.

Read more less

Catherine's mother died when Catherine was just a baby girl, leaving nothing but her perfect reputation to live up to. Or so she thought. But then Catherine finds a box addressed to her, filled with objects seemingly without meaning - three feathers, an exotic seashell, a painting, a mirror, two prints, an address book, a map, a hat, a rucksack and a necklace. And while she's busy playing detective trying to find out who her mother was, she finds out more about herself than she ever really wanted to know. Secrets are discovered, truths uncovered, and Catherine realises that maybe there was something more to her mother, something that her familiy has kept from her. How long a shadow can a dead woman cast?

Read more less

Margaret Forster presents the 'edited' diary of a woman, born in 1901, whose life spans the twentieth century. On the eve of the Great War, Millicent King begins to keep her journal and vividly records the dramas of everyday life in a family touched by war, tragedy, and money troubles. From bohemian London to Rome in the 1920s her story moves on to social work and the build-up to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London. Here is twentieth-century woman in close-up coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives from WWI to Greenham Common and beyond. A triumph of resolution and evocation, this is a beautifully observed story of an ordinary woman's life - a narrative where every word rings true.

Read more less

‘I was born on 25th May, 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, a house on the outer edges of Raffles, a council estate. I was a lucky girl.’ So begins Margaret Forster’s journey through the houses she’s lived in, from that sparkling new council house, to her beloved London home of today. This is not a book about bricks and mortar though. This is a book about what houses are to us, the effect they have on the way we live our lives and the changing nature of our homes: from blacking grates and outside privies; to cities dominated by bedsits and lodgings; to the houses of today converted back into single dwellings. Finally, it is a gently insistent, personal inquiry into the meaning of home.

Read more less

London 1844, and a shy young woman has arrived to take up a new position in the grandeur of No. 50, Wimpole Street. Subtly and compellingly, Lady's Maid gives voice to Elizabeth Wilson's untold story, her complex relationship with her mistress, Elizabeth Barrett, and her dramatic role in the most famous elopement in history.

Read more less

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA'A remarkable book . . . brilliant comic writing' THE TIMES'An enthralling picture of family life . . . devotion to Gerald, the man' KIRKUS REVIEWS'Du Maurier has no equal' DAILY TELEGRAPH Sir Gerald du Maurier was the most celebrated actor-manager of his day, knighted for his services to the theatre in 1922. He was also a father to one of the most enduring writers of the twentieth century. Published within six months of her father's death, this frank biography was considered shocking by many of his admirers, but it was a huge success, winning Daphne du Maurier critical acclaim and launching her career.In Gerald: A Portrait, Daphne du Maurier captures the spirit and charm of the charismatic actor who played the original Captain Hook. It amusingly recalls his eccentricities, sense of humour and sensitively portrays the darker side of his nature and bouts of depression.

Read more less

The definitive biography of Daphne Du Maurier, one of history's greatest psychological thriller novelistsRebecca, published in 1938, brought its author instant international acclaim, capturing the popular imagination with its haunting atmosphere of suspense and mystery. Du Maurier was immediately established as the queen of the psychological thriller. But the more fame this and her other books encouraged, the more reclusive Daphne du Maurier became.Margaret Forster's award-winning biography could hardly be more worthy of its subject. Drawing on private letters and papers, and with the unflinching co-operation of Daphne du Maurier's family, Margaret Forster explores the secret drama of her life - the stifling relationship with her father, actor-manager Gerald du Maurier; her troubled marriage to war hero and royal aide, 'Boy' Browning; her wartime love affair; her passion for Cornwall and her deep friendships with the last of her father's actress loves, Gertrude Lawrence, and with an aristocratic American woman.Most significant of all, Margaret Forster ingeniously strips away the relaxed and charming facade to lay bare the true workings of a complex and emotional character whose passionate and often violent stories mirrored her own fantasy life more than anyone could ever have imagined.

Read more less

Most of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry has been unavailable to new readers, in spite of a growing appreciation of her innovativeness as a poet—and it spite of her onvious importance for any feminist reading of nineteenth-century English poetry. With the publication of this book, a major portion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's wok returns to print.The poems selected here includ early verse published in 1826, when the poet was twenty, as well as the last poems she wrote before her death in 1861. Her religious verse appears alongside lively ballads, examples of her social-reforming and political verse, and generous selections of her love poetry, including the whole of the Sonnets from the Portuguese.The volume illustrates Elizabeth Barrett Browning's development as a poet and reveals her contribution to feminist literature. Innocent-seeming ballads, beloved in the Victorian period for their sweetness and condemned thereafter for their cloying sentimentality, here emerge as subversive articulations of the plight of women. "Few heard what Elizabeth Barrett Browning said [in her time]," Margaret Forster writes. "Today, with ears more finely attuned, we can hear her clearly."

Read more less

At the end of almost every day of their fifty-five years of married life, the publicity-shy author Margaret Forster would ask the naturally gregarious and outgoing Hunter Davies to describe to her the highlights of his day in the worlds of journalism and publishing. In the six years that have elapsed since Margaret''s death, Hunter has continued these conversations with his wife, regaling her with accounts of the events and developments in his life domestic, social, romantic, book-related, health-related and others through a sequence of ''Letters to Margaret''. The letters are pure Hunter Davies: a feast of gossipy stream-of-consciousness that weaves together strands of confession, self-mockery, anecdote and touching remembrance of married happiness with Margaret. Entertaining, informative, irreverent and indiscreet and sometimes very touching Letters to Margaret reveals an eighty-seven-year-old Hunter still raging against the dying of the light, and seeking consolation

Read more less