[In the following review, Morrison offers a favorable assessment of Hidden Lives.]

One of the major endeavours of social historians over the past thirty years has been the recovery—through letters, diaries, parish registers and oral accounts—of “hidden” or “missing” lives: the lives, that is, of those too insignificant to figure in the history of great men and warring nations. Margaret Forster's study of three generations of working-class women from a Carlisle family [Hidden Lives] is written in this spirit of recovery, and among the sources it draws on is the Cumbria Council County Archive. What sets the book apart from most social history isn't so much that it's by an accomplished novelist (though that certainly helps the narrative) but that the family under the lens is Margaret Forster's own. Indeed, by the time it reaches the third generation, the book has become frankly autobiographical, an account of the childhood and young adulthood of Forster herself.

Margaret Ann Jordan, the author's grandmother, was a mystery even to her children. Though born in 1869, she never mentioned, and did her best to erase all record of, the first twenty-three years of her life—the years preceding her employment as a domestic servant and (later) her marriage to a butcher called Thomas Hind. The mystery deepened on her death in 1936, when a woman claiming to be her daughter turned up at the funeral. Margaret Ann's three children—Lilian, Jean and Nan—had never heard of any fourth daughter and sent the woman packing.

It was not until 1981, after Lilian, her mother's death, that Margaret Forster felt free to try to solve the family mystery; unlike everyone else, it seems, she “wanted to know” and thought that knowing might teach her something important about who and what she was The relevant certificates were uncovered with relative ease, and they showed that Margaret Ann, herself an illegimate child, had given birth to an illegimate daughter called Alice when she was nineteen.

Less easy, and ultimately impossible, to solve was the mystery of how Margaret Ann (whose own mother had died when she was two) could have abandoned and severed all contact with Alice, even though, for a time, she lived in the same neighbourhood; she wasn't even present at Alice's wedding, sending her husband (who was the father of her other daughters but not, it seems, of Alice) in her place. Could there have been secret meetings between mother and daughter, Forster wonders? Was Alice perhaps paid to stay away? Might she have been the product of a violent conception, even rape? Frustratingly—both for Forster and for the reader—an answer is never found. Whereas the domestic life of Margaret Ann is filled in with wonderfully cluttered detail, there remains this black hole in emotion and understanding.

More predictable, perhaps, is that Margaret Ann's secret shame should have made her harsh and censorious about women who have illegitimate babies—and fearful that this rate might overtake her own daughters. Truer than they knew to family tradition, both Jean and Nan became pregnant while unmarried, Jean to a working-class Scot called Dave, Nan to a rich, dandyish, deeply elusive Englishman called Jack. The men—breaking the mould—stuck by and married their girlfriends (for Jack, this meant first getting a divorce), vindicating Nan and Jean's belief that love, not security or respectability, is what counts. That belief made them harsh on their elder sister Lilian, the author's mother, who—successful, happy and well paid at work—chucked it all up to marry the dull, cautious and less well-paid Arthur (there was no question of women, once wed, keeping their jobs). If their early married life sounds at times similar to that of the Morels in Sons and Lovers (his dirt and physicality, her scrimping and frustration), there was at least no violence. And the arguments the sisters had—about priorities in love, marriage, work and motherhood—seem much closer to 1990 than to D. H. Lawrence.

In 1943, Lilian seems to have had some kind of nervous breakdown. At this point, the book changes direction, as Lilian's daughter Margaret (aged five) ceases to be “she” and becomes “I,” entering stage left “in a cloud of freezing ice” and “letting my own version of family lore come into play.” Like her mother, young Margaret was clever at school; unlike her, she was difficult, defiant, ambitious (to be a film star, or a writer), and determined to escape domestic drudgery. This, she decided, probably meant avoiding marriage and children.

The book having now become autobiographical, there's the danger here of some rather too easy indulgence in childhood memory (school, holidays, shopping expeditions, trips to teashops). But Forster's preoccupation isn't petites madeleines, or even chocolate eclairs; it's the task of placing herself in relation to her matriarchs, and of wondering how much misery need be handed on down the line. As a young woman, she eagerly seized freedoms and opportunities which her mother had been denied simply through having been born a generation earlier—not just an Oxford education and a writing career, but having holidays abroad, cooking for pleasure, owning a fridge and knowing you didn't need to get pregnant except by choice.

The narrative line is that of an escape story. While still in her mid-twenties, Margaret Forster had written a highly successful novel, Georgy Girl (later an even more successful film), was happily married to the journalist Hunter Davies, had a house in Hampstead, and could embark on motherhood knowing it didn't mean sacrificing her career. It was a triumph, and the author—risking triumphalism—doesn't mind telling us so. But she wants us to see it not as a personal victory but as a generational one, and one which shows how conditions have improved: “Everything, for a woman, is better now, even if it is still not as good as it could be. To forget or deny that is an insult to the women who have gone before. …”

The tone is breezy and positive. But there is much guilt and sadness in the book, too. “It hasn't amounted to much, my life,” Lilian reflects grimly on her deathbed, envying her liberated daughter. Margaret Forster consoles her that she's been a wonderful mother, wife and daughter, and that “a few skittery books” don't amount to much, either. But she knows, and we do, that Lilian is right—that her life, like millions of other women's lives, was more cramped and unhappy than it need have been. At least now in this tough, touching, never skittery memoir, a handful of those hidden lives have been properly commemorated.