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“... was also, in a sense, a conscious and loving masochist in relation to her father and family, and Margaret Forster has done an admirable job in investigating what really went on among them. It takes two – or rather three – to make an Andromeda, and Elizabeth herself was a powerful unit in a close-knit Compton-Burnett family, who all recognised in ...”

“... any meritocracy would themselves have sunk without trace. Interestingly, the opening paragraph of Margaret Forster’s Daphne du Maurier makes good use of this particular technique: ‘Sheet-lightning split the sky over London on the evening of 12 May 1907 and thunder rumbled long into the night. All day it had been sultry, the trees in Regent’s Park ...”

“... family incrimination and recrimination and of likeness disliked by both parties, mother and child. Margaret Forster has a good ear for paranoia, as well as for the paranoia of that accusation itself. ‘All that is absolute rubbish, a clear case of paranoia’ – as if paranoia weren’t always desperately cunning at not permitting of a clear ...”

“... the boot might conceivably be on the other foot’) is fatally at odds with its modern interior. Margaret Forster seems on altogether surer ground in Lady’s Maid, which also takes up the case of a marginal figure in a larger narrative, though here the narrative is history, not fiction. The ground is that of her own recent biography of Elizabeth ...”

“... TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video nasty. Young male novelists routinely seek to give maximum offence. Martin Amis did so in 1975 by calling a novel Dead Babies. In The Wasp Factory Banks recounted acts of child-on-child ...”

“... can affirm that she will lose all these capacities. As his prognostications are proved correct, Margaret Forster charts the efforts of Grandma’s family to cope with their growing problem. Most of the practical responsibility falls to three female members of that family. Of her two sons, Stuart, a policeman, thinks she should be in a council ...”

“... and afterwards mayor of St Laurent-le-Nouveau: not exactly a trimmer, not exactly a coward. Margaret Forster’s Mother Can You Hear Me? is well-titled and the answer is no. To my knowledge, there is no official Daughter’s Day yet, but this book is one long high-pitched celebration of the situation of daughter misunderstood by mother. There are ...”

“... and housed in an old lunatic asylum. Having fallen extravagantly in love with a young woman, Margaret Sprunt, the new librarian married on his tiny salary, but soon began to spend his vacations away from his wife, in North Wales, ‘whose wild splendours’, Sampson points out, ‘the railway had brought much closer to Liverpool’. In the spring of 1901 ...”

“... suggest the many approaches historians of women can appropriate from other areas of history. Margaret Forster’s is the most conventional of the four. Her subtitle is misleading: her thoughtful and interesting book is not a sociological analysis of rank-and-file provincial feminists, but collects together short biographies of eight well-known women ...”

“... of England, Camden Town, Kilburn. These places are frequented by other contemporary novelists like Margaret Forster, Hilary Mantel and Jeanette Winterson; two of them black humorists like Bainbridge, but none quite as funny, and certainly not as unexpected and disturbing. She is a cross between a witch and a clown. Clowns unleash chaos, and that is what ...”

“... calls it ‘excruciating’); no, it was an ‘admirably strong open letter’ (according to Margaret Forster’s recent biography of Mrs Browning). Mr Barrett was a cruel tyrant; not at all, he was a loving father about whom his daughter lied and exaggerated. Mr Barrett, regarded for a century or more as an archetypal ogre, has indeed found some ...”

“... amplify or judiciously correct Ray’s version. No one has, or ever will, supersede him. Margaret Forster in 1978 attempted an imaginary autobiography. Ann Monsarrat’s brisk Thackeray: An Uneasy Victorian is strong on the Mrs Brookfield imbroglio. The best of the post-Ray efforts is Catherine Peters’s psycho-biographical Thackeray’s ...”

“... What makes this novel a bit unusual is that it is conceived as an act of homage to E.M. Forster, ‘to whom’, the author writes, ‘all my fiction is indebted, one way or the other’. The acknowledgment is obscure and ‘one way or the other’ could, but probably doesn’t, mean ‘both by attraction and repulsion ...”

“... rest than in the company of cool, humouring, compassionate observers like Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster, or of Lionel Trilling himself? Naturally if you write as if present and past were one, you tend to write about purely notional things and people; like Matthew Arnold, you attach your imagination to the idea. And since ideas are bloodless you run the risk ...”

“... classical scholar invoked by Virginia Woolf at the beginning of A Room of One’s Own. Butts, like Forster and Woolf, was deeply interested in Harrison’s writings, especially her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis (1912). Harrison boldly advanced the view that the pre-Homeric religion of Greece had not been one of Olympian serenity ...”