Margaret Forster

Died: February 8, 2016

MARGARET Forster, who has died aged 77, was a writer and novelist who, in a career spanning more than 50 years wrote 40 books; novels, biographies, memoirs and social histories. Eschewing the time-wasting, air-kissing, back-scratching, canape-guzzling round of parties that is London’s literary scene, Forster preferred to stay in her Hampstead home and get on with work.

Acutely aware that writing books requires discipline as well as talent, she wrote every morning always using a fountain pen. Afternoons were spent walking on the nearby heath or taking in a film. In the evenings, she read, either for pleasure or research.

Though Forster revelled in domesticity and was a dedicated wife and mother, she was assiduous in protecting a room of her own. Constant contact with the outside world was maintained through her husband, Hunter Davies, the prolific journalist and writer, who kept her in touch with the gossip and goings-on among the chatterati.

Married for fifty-five years, they were complementary. While she was an intellectual, he was a regular at White Hart Lane, home to Tottenham Hotspur. As recently as last weekend, in his column in the Sunday Times, Davies recalled that while it was his job to look after the family’s finances, his feminist wife did all the cooking, washing, ironing and cleaning. In that same column, he also noted: “My wife, who has generally gone through life fitter, stronger and healthier than me, has gone into a hospice for respite care. So for the past four weeks I have been on my own, feeling dazed and disoriented.”

Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle in 1938 where, as one of three children, she was brought up on a housing estate. Her father was a factory worker and her mother a secretary in the health department. Their bright, determined, independent-thinking daughter was an incessant visitor to the local library, which was her gateway to a brighter future. She was educated at the County High School for Girls and thereafter, thanks to a scholarship, at Somerville College, Oxford, where she liked to pretend she came of gypsy stock. Among her contemporaries were the theatre director Trevor Nunn and the playwright Dennis Potter.

Immediately after university she married Davies and the couple decamped to London where in the 1960s they became part of the swinging set who orbited round the Beatles, about whom Davies wrote a formative and bestselling biography.

Forster’s first novel, Dames’ Delight, which appeared in 1964, took its title from the spot on the River Cherwell where women bathed in the nude. But it was Georgy Girl, her second novel, published a year later, which captured the spirit of the zeitgeist and which made her name. Its eponymous young heroine is determined to plot her own course in life, despite being married and a mother. That her husband was a millionaire may have been also have been a significant factor. The film of the book, which starred Lynn Redgrave in the title role as well as Charlotte Rampling, James Mason and Alan Bates, was likewise well-received and added to Forster’s lustre. But Forster was never the kind of person whose head was turned easily by fame, once reportedly deleting a call on the answering machine from Paul McCartney to her husband.

Writing fiction, it seems, came easily to her. More challenging were biographies which involved considerable amounts of travel and research. Her first was The Rash Adventurer, about Bonnie Prince Charlie, in 1973. Others, on William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Daphne du Maurier, followed. Of du Maurier she wrote, “Never was there a clearer case of a writer who ‘lived to write’, or of a writer for whom life came to have no meaning and little joy without writing.”

Three other women she admired – Mary Livingstone, Fanny Stevenson and Jenny Lee – and with whom she felt in tune were the subject of Good Wives? (2001). However, Forster could not resist the opportunity to write about her own life, portraying her husband as the kind of man who prefers short to long trousers, and, when raining, galoshes that make him look “exactly like a caricature of a frog”. Such frankness, she reckoned, was what made her a “good wife”, an opinion with which her husband heartily concurred.

Sentimentality and self-pity were not luxuries she could afford and she had a Victorian attitude to setbacks. She coped with illness in herself and family members by confronting it. She and Davies had three children, Jake, Flora and Caitlin, who, while living in Botswana, was the victim of a brutal rape. True to her upbringing, she wrote about what had happened to her in Place of Reeds (2005). In 2014, Forster wrote My Life in Houses, an inventive, much-praised attempt at autobiography, which one reviewer considered “beautiful and profound”.

Measuring out her life by the seven places in which she stayed, what emerged was a celebration of home and stability, domesticity and ordinariness. Coinciding with the recurrence of cancer for which she had been treated in her thirties, it was affirmation of her belief that a house is more than just a roof over one’s head but a refuge that may be adapted according to circumstance. Her valedictory novel, How to Measure a Cow, her 27th, is due to be published next month. In it, a woman leaves London to start a new life in a Cumbrian town that she has chosen at random. It was a return to the writer’s roots, and to which in any case Forster and Davies decamped every summer, to their second home in the quiet village of Loweswater in the Lake District.

She is survived by her husband and their children.

ALAN TAYLOR