SOURCE: “A Browning Version,” in Times Literary Supplement, July 20–26, 1990, p. 781.

In the following review, Hardy offers a favorable assessment of Lady's Maid.

The Brownings have offered rich pickings for other writers. It's hard to disentangle the spoilt Flush from Virginia Woolf's imagery, impossible to believe that Edward Barrett of Wimpole Street didn't charm and storm exactly like Charles Laughton. Margaret Forster's new novel Lady's Maid clings to the skirts of history, creating a new heroine, Wilson, Elizabeth Barrett's lady's maid, and ambitiously re-imagines the Brownings from her point of view.

In a nice ironic turn, Wilson is a letter-writer, countering her employers' epistolary brilliance, and making a notation for her consciousness. Her style is a kind of compromise between standard and vernacular, veering towards a fluid conversational prose, with no pronounced solecisms. If it's not a patch on the intelligent, individual, and clearly uneducated writing of a Joan...