[In the following positive review, Benn questions the genre classification of Hidden Lives, asserting that the study “is most easily classified as social history.”]

This book began when Margaret Forster's publisher asked her to refute the claims by some feminists that women's lives have not significantly improved over the past century. While Hidden Lives amounts to a powerful argument against such a claim, it is not a general or sociological book but a specific inquiry into the moral, emotional and material lives of three women within her own family, all working class in origin, but with very different fates.

The result is a fascinating, lucid but essentially hybrid work. It starts as something of a detective story, with Forster's attempt to establish the facts behind the “mystery woman in black” who visits her grandmother, Margaret Ann Jordan, towards the end of her life, and then comes knocking after the funeral. According to family legend, this was her grandmother's illegitimate daughter—the unacknowledged Alice—but family morals prohibited any further delving. Only when her mother died in 1981 did Forster finally feel free to explore this hidden part of her family history. But while the story of her hunt for the lost daughter makes for exciting reading—and incidentally, proves the crucial importance of local record-keeping—her efforts come frustratingly to nothing. Alice slips from the book as quietly and finally as she disappeared from the Jordan family house.

Hidden Lives is most easily classified as social history: an exploration of the solid detail of everyday lives, particularly women's. And it is here, in the “thick description,” that Forster most convincingly makes a case for dramatic improvement over the past century.

How, she implicitly demands, can we possibly compare her grandmother's punishing life as a domestic servant in turn-of-the-century Carlisle to her own life as a writer and mother 60 years later? For it is not just her own personal success that explains this change but the revolution in everything from labour-saving devices to sexual mores that makes life for all women of whatever class much easier.

The book shows that, while some women have always done paid work, our understanding of its psychological importance to women is new. Certainly, the saddest story is of Forster's own mother, Lily. She began life hopefully with a prestigious job in Carlisle's public health department. But after marriage and motherhood, that strange depression of those with little status in the world descended upon her. You didn't have to be living in 1950s America to suffer from the “problem that has no name.”

Forster lingers lovingly on the psychology of family relationships, the third and strongest element of Hidden Lives. By far the most poignant passages concern her relationship with her mother. Lily looks with bewilderment on a daughter who scribbles for a living and drinks white wine for lunch. She is paradoxically resentful at what Margaret has, but hasn't taken. “Given my income my mother would have been a spender. Given the chance—she would have been a lady who lunched at the Savoy Grill, the Ritz.”

“It hasn't amounted to much, my life,” Lily cries bitterly during her final illness. Such statements, and the petty but heart-rending squabbles between mother and daughter, prove—more than a thousand statistics ever will—just how much women's expectations have changed. Forster is well placed to chart the shift because she has never rejected the importance of motherhood—for herself and others. And yet, within one generation, there is a gaping psychological difference between the mother—representative of a dutiful femininity that would take nothing for itself but still felt cheated—and the daughter who had it all: work, happiness and babies.