Book description
What is a 'good wife'? The bestselling author of Hidden Lives
explores four marriages, including her own, in different times and
societies to find the answer.
In 1848 Mary Moffatt became the wife of the missionary and explorer
David Livingstone - and her obedience and devotion eventually killed
her. In 1960, Margaret Forster married her school sweetheart Hunter
Davies in a London Registry Office - and interpreted the role very
differently. Between these two marriages is a huge gulf in which the
notion of marriage changed immeasurably.
Forster traces the shift in emphasis from submission to partnership,
first through the marriage of one unconventional American, Fanny
Osbourne, to Robert Louis Stevenson, in the late nineteenth century;
and then through that of Jennie Lee to Aneurin Bevan in the 1930s.
Why does a woman still want to be a wife in the twenty-first
century? What is the value of marriage today? Why do couples still
marry in church? These are some of the questions Forster asks as she
weaves the personal experience of forty years through the stories of
three wives who have long fascinated her.
Margaret Forster is 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?, Over
and
Isa and May
, as well as bestselling memoirs (
Hidden Lives
and
Precious Lives
) and biographies. She is married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies
and lives in London and the Lake District.
