[In the following review, Hardy offers a favorable assessment of Lady's Maid.]

The Brownings have offered rich pickings for other writers. It's hard to disentangle the spoilt Flush from Virginia Woolf's imagery, impossible to believe that Edward Barrett of Wimpole Street didn't charm and storm exactly like Charles Laughton. Margaret Forster's new novel Lady's Maid clings to the skirts of history, creating a new heroine, Wilson, Elizabeth Barrett's lady's maid, and ambitiously re-imagines the Brownings from her point of view.

In a nice ironic turn, Wilson is a letter-writer, countering her employers' epistolary brilliance, and making a notation for her consciousness. Her style is a kind of compromise between standard and vernacular, veering towards a fluid conversational prose, with no pronounced solecisms. If it's not a patch on the intelligent, individual, and clearly uneducated writing of a Joan Durbeyfield or a Michael Henchard, it's a sensitive and sufficiently plausible language for innocence and experience. (The novel has some anachronisms, like “a nonsense” and “wishful thinking.”) The servant's story is thoroughly imagined, socially illustrative and psychologically individual. The narrative structure, a hybrid of the old and the new, is ingenious. We may see it spinning substance and continuity out of the brief mentions in the letters, but if we don't remember Wilson's appearances, there is the pleasurable play of expecting the famous crises and climaxes, courtship, marriage, birth and death, and finding them dramatized in the maid's version.

Wilson's own story is movingly told, as she achieves self-expression, makes choices, and asserts herself, in circumstances which inhibit utterance and freedom. She makes a timid entry to the household and to London, grows in knowledge and skills, makes friends, finds lovers, and formulates her attitudes to experience. Her pleasures, losses, and disappointments in love are complicated and excellently understated, imagined as a contrast to the grand passions she has to serve. And it is a political story, showing some of the humiliations of service, for employer as well as servant. The Brownings emerge as a little more ungenerous, callous, authoritarian and self-centred than they do in the correspondence. They are also seen as capable of generosity, sensitivity, and some measure of friendship, but the narrative displacement tips the balance in the servant's favour as far as the reader's sympathy is concerned. Such experimental investigation of the employee's point of view would condemn other great and good Victorians; George Eliot might come out worse: she wrote an obnoxious essay joking about “Servants' Logic.” But there is no doubt that Wilson is the author's pet, and the sense of favouritism softens the political analysis.

The poets' creativity is conspicuously absent, as again we might expect. Masters and mistresses are not geniuses to their servants, apart from Lord Peter Wimsey. But at an early stage Wilson does read Elizabeth's poems, and comments on her cleverness, suggesting that she wishes to learn from the learning. Nothing develops from this, which seems a pity, especially as Wilson's acclimatization to Italy, based on solid evidence, shows her abilities. Margaret Forster's useful afterword, instancing some of the facts and fictions, hints at a sequel. Perhaps Wilson will become a Browning reader.