Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56383 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

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

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

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

Customer Reviews

A good travel read.
I read this book while travelling on the trains and was just captured by the attention to detail and by the narrater's talent for recording - yes, this book is a diary and what a witty acount you get. I found it hard not to think about the accounts in the book and how I sympathised with the main protagonist - you'll absolutely love it. A well deserved five stars.

A patent subterfuge
A curious attempt to fool the reader into believing the author had edited someone else's diary, she gives herself away in her anachronistic use of vocabulary alien to the period to which the diaries relate.

The story purports to be of an ordinary woman but Millicent is more what a person of her generation might have called a rentier, living largely off the good fortune of the investments she inherits.

Our credulity is stretched as the author creates a character whose brother returns injured from the Great War with shellshock. Further siblings are killed in the Second World War in the military and the loss of most of a family in the blitz. The fiance she nearly had is beheaded by the Japanese and her adopted daughter then becomes a Greenham Common peace campaigner.

All these are believable vignettes into the tragedy which was the twentieth century but not as the voice and feelings of one ordinary woman. Only on the last page of the book does the author confess her trick - one I had easily spotted in the first few pages.

No ordinary woman!
Having read and loved Margaret Forster's "Hidden Lives" I looked forward to reading this book. I realised before starting the "diary" that it was fictional but was still interested in the idea of the story of a woman whose life spanned the 20th century. Ultimately, however, it failed to fulfil expectations. First, this is no ordinary woman. Her background is quite comfortable, indeed she has an independent income for most of her life from her parents' investments, giving her more freedom of choice regarding work and marriage than most. She never marries, which again is unusual in this period. She starts off adventurous and keen to travel but never takes up the offer of going to the USA by a family that she likes. Most of all, however, what I found was lacking in this "diary" were the small details of everyday life which really bring a diary to life (think of Samuel Pepys and Fanny Burney, for instance). Disappointing.