ABSTRACT
This chapter presents concise biographical information of Margaret Forster and analysis of her major works and themes. A prolific biographer and memoirist as well as novelist, Forster had the first big success of her literary career in 1965 with the publication of Georgy Girl, later made into a defining film of the 1960s, but much of her best and most characteristic work, in both fiction and non-fiction, belongs to the last twenty years. Most of Forster's fiction deals with the domestic lives of women and their place in family relationships as wives, mothers and daughters and is informed by a strong awareness of the social issues which can affect them. Her books often explore the contradictions between the expectations of women in the modern world and the traditional demands of female familial duty and show her characters as they battle to assert their own individuality in the face of other characters and social forces which seek to quash it.
