Goodbye, my Georgy Girl
Author of Sixties classic was cleverest woman I ever met, says her husband
THE award-winning writer Margaret Forster, author of the 1960s classic Georgy Girl, died yesterday at the age of 77.
Her husband, the writer Hunter Davies, led the literary world’s tributes to the woman who had been his wife for 55 years.
Miss Forster, who died at the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead, north London, had been suffering from cancer, 40 years after she had a double mastectomy.
‘She was a remarkable woman in every way,’ said Mr Davies, 80.
‘She was the cleverest woman I ever met. She was emotionally clever, in that she could always understand people and predict their actions and their feelings and motives. She was just the most marvellous woman.’
Miss Forster, a former Booker Prize judge and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, won awards for her novels and non- fiction works, which included biographies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Daphne du Maurier, and the memoirs Hidden Lives and Precious Lives.
But it was for Georgy Girl that she was best known. The 1965 novel, about a free-spirited young woman who adopts her flatmate’s baby while torn between relationships with the child’s father and her own father’s employer, was turned into an Oscar-nominated film, starring Lynn Redgrave, Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates and James Mason.
In a moving article in this week’s Sunday Times, Mr Davies, the Beatles’ biographer, spoke of his struggle to cope with domestic life during Miss Forster’s final illness.
‘Yes, I know it is pathetic,’ he wrote. ‘During our 55 years of married life, I have contributed eff all to our domestic life – neither cooking nor cleaning, washing nor wiping. 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.’
Mr Davies said his wife had not cared about money or fame but had written for the ‘fun’ of writing and had rarely agreed to do publicity work. She was unimpressed by his 2014 OBE for services to literature, he said, adding: ‘She said that if it had been a knighthood she would have divorced me.’
Born in Carlisle in 1938, Miss Forster, the daughter of a mechanic, won a scholarship to study history at Somerville College, Oxford. Her contemporaries at Oxford included the playwright Dennis Potter, who later wrote professing his love for her, which she dismissed, saying: ‘I wrote back and told him he was talking rubbish.’
She had already met her future husband while they were teenagers in their home town of Carlisle and they married in 1960.
After graduating, she taught at Barnsbury Girls’ School in Islington, North London, before publishing her debut novel, Dame’s Delight, in 1964.
She and Mr Davies, who had three children and four grandchildren, divided their time between London and Cumbria – Miss Forster described the Lake District as ‘balm for my soul’.
Her latest novel, How To Measure A Cow, is due to be released next month.
The broadcaster Lord Bragg, a friend of Miss Forster, told Radio 4: ‘She loved writing, she said sometimes that she loved writing too much. There was a sparkle about her. She cut to the core of things. She was an extraordinary woman.’
The Royal Society of Literature said: ‘Margaret Forster was an extraordinarily prolific and gifted writer of fiction, non-fiction and literary criticism.’