Diary Of An Ordinary Woman

An 'ordinary' woman lives through extraordinary times in this brilliantly conceived and unputdownable journal of a life, by the bestselling author of memoirs, novels and biographies.

Margaret Forster presents the 'edited' diary of a woman, born 1901, died in 1995. From the age of thirteen, on the eve of the Great War, Millicent King keeps her journal in a series of exercise books. With a touching clearsightedness she vividly records the dramas of everyday life in an ordinary family touched by war, tragedy and money troubles in the early decades of the century.

She struggles to become a teacher, but wants more out of life. From bohemian literary London to Rome in the twenties, 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. She has proposals of marriage and secret lovers, ambition and optimism. But then her life is turned upside down once more by wartime deaths.

Here is twentieth-century woman seen brilliantly in close-up - independent, spirited, prickly, vulnerable, determined, coping with the large and small tragedies and upheavals of women's lives, from World War 2 to Greenham Common and beyond, and making it through.

A triumph of resolution and evocation, with echoes of Forster's 'Hidden Lives' and 'Private Papers' and a voice all its own, this is a heartbreaking, heartening, beautifully observed story of an unknown woman's life - a narrative where every word rings true.