Diary of an Ordinary Woman

Diary of an Ordinary Woman is a novel by Margaret Forster, framed as an "edited" diary of a fictional woman who lives through most of the major events of the 20th century, covering the years 1914 to 1995.[1][2] So realistic that many readers believed it to be an authentic diary,[2] it is one of Forster's best-known novels.[1][2][3][4]

Diary of an Ordinary Woman
AuthorMargaret Forster
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
GenreNovel
PublisherChatto & Windus
Publication date
6 March 2003
Media typePrint (Hardback)
Pages420 pp
ISBN0-7011-7412-9
OCLC51914252

Martin Chilton, writing in The Daily Telegraph, describes it as an "intermittent record of a quiet life dominated by the fact, the threat and the fear of war" and considers its main theme to be the cost of war.[1]

Plot

From the age of thirteen, on the eve of the Great War, Millicent King keeps her journals in a series of exercise books. The diary records the dramas of everyday life in an ordinary English 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.

gollark: Am I better at resisting peer pressure than other people: well, I'd *like* to think so, but so would probably everyone else ever.
gollark: Anyway, I have, I think, reasonably strong "no genocide" ethics. But I don't know if, in a situation where everyone seemed implicitly/explicitly okay with helping with genocides, and where I feared that I would be punished if I either didn't help in some way or didn't appear supportive of helping, I would actually stick to this, since I don't think I've ever been in an environment with those sorts of pressures.
gollark: Maybe I should try arbitrarily increasing the confusion via recursion.
gollark: If people are randomly assigned (after initial mental development and such) to an environment where they're much more likely to do bad things, and one where they aren't, then it seems unreasonable to call people who are otherwise the same worse from being in the likely-to-do-bad-things environment.I suppose you could argue that how "good" you are is more about the change in probability between environments/the probability of a given real world environment being one which causes you to do bad things. But we can't check those with current technology.
gollark: I think you can think about it from a "veil of ignorance" angle too.

References
  1. Chilton, Martin (8 February 2016), "Georgy Girl author Margaret Forster dies, aged 77", The Telegraph, retrieved 9 February 2016
  2. Ruth Gorb (8 February 2016), "Margaret Forster obituary", The Guardian, retrieved 9 February 2016
  3. "Author Margaret Forster dies from cancer aged 77", BBC, 8 February 2016, retrieved 8 February 2016
  4. Margaret Forster: Biography, British Council, retrieved 10 February 2016


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