Margaret Forster, English novelist, Died at 77

  Writers

Margaret Forster was born on May 25, 1938, in Carlisle, England and died on February 8, 2016.

She was an English author.

Forster attended Carlisle and County High School for Girls from 1949–1956, and then won an Open Scholarship to read modern history at Somerville College, Oxford, from where she graduated in 1960.

For a while she was a teacher at Barnsbury Girls’ School in Islington, north London (1961–1963), Margaret became a writer working as a novelist, biographer and freelance literary critic, contributing regularly to book programmes on television, to newspapers and magazines and programmes on BBC Radio 4.

She was a member of the BBC Advisory Committee on the Social Effects of Television (1975–1977), the Arts Council Literary Panel (1978–1981), and chief reviewer for non-fiction in the Evening Standard (1977–1980).

Margaret Forster was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975.

As a novelist, her work included Georgy Girl (1965, filmed in 1966 and adapted for a short-lived 1970 Broadway musical), Lady’s Maid (1990), Diary of an Ordinary Woman (2003), Have the Men Had Enough? (1989) and The Memory Box (1999); two memoirs, Hidden Lives (1995) and Precious Lives (1998); and several biographies, most recently Good Wives (2001) and a fictionalised biography of the artist Gwen John, Keeping the World Away (2006).

She was the author of Rich Desserts and Captain’s Thin (1997), an account of the Carr’s biscuit factory in Carlisle.

Margaret Forster has received awards for both her fiction and non-fiction works: Elizabeth Barrett Browning: a Biography (Heinemann Award, 1989); Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller (Writers’ Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction, 1993 – Fawcett Society Book Prize, 1994); Rich Desserts and Captain’s Thin: a Family and Their Times 1831–1931 (Lex Prize of The Global Business Book Award, 1997); Precious Lives (J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, 1999).

Her husband was the writer, journalist and broadcaster Hunter Davies. They lived in London and in the Lake District.

Margaret Forster passed away at 77 yrs old.