SOURCE: “Margaret's Mystery,” in Times Literary Supplement, September 29, 1995, p. 28.

In the following review, Morrison offers a favorable assessment of Hidden Lives.

One of the major endeavours of social historians over the past thirty years has been the recovery—through letters, diaries, parish registers and oral accounts—of “hidden” or “missing” lives: the lives, that is, of those too insignificant to figure in the history of great men and warring nations. Margaret Forster's study of three generations of working-class women from a Carlisle family [Hidden Lives] is written in this spirit of recovery, and among the sources it draws on is the Cumbria Council County Archive. What sets the book apart from most social history isn't so much that it's by an accomplished novelist (though that certainly helps the narrative) but that the family under the lens is Margaret Forster's own. Indeed, by the time it reaches the third...