SOURCE: “Wilson of Wimpole Street,” in Spectator, July 7, 1990, p. 31.

In the following mixed review of Lady's Maid, Beauman cites Forster's “highly original attempt to demolish the wall between fiction and biography,” but considers the novel tedious and implausible.

‘The life of Lily Wilson is extremely obscure and thus cries aloud for the services of a biographer. No human figure in the Browning letters, save the principals, more excites our curiosity and baffles it,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in 1933, in a six-page note at the end of her ‘life of a dog, Mrs. Browning's Flush.’

Lady's Maid is a novel about Wilson's life from 1844 when she came from Newcastle to be Elizabeth Barrett Browning's maid at 50 Wimpole Street until 1861 when her mistress died. Some details have long been known from the Browning letters: Wilson's ‘honest, true and affectionate heart,’ her cheerful adaptation to life at Casa Guidi. Then, in her...