SOURCE: A review of Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir, in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 8, No. 373, October 6, 1995, pp. 38–39.

In the following positive review, Benn questions the genre classification of Hidden Lives, asserting that the study “is most easily classified as social history.”

This book began when Margaret Forster's publisher asked her to refute the claims by some feminists that women's lives have not significantly improved over the past century. While Hidden Lives amounts to a powerful argument against such a claim, it is not a general or sociological book but a specific inquiry into the moral, emotional and material lives of three women within her own family, all working class in origin, but with very different fates.

The result is a fascinating, lucid but essentially hybrid work. It starts as something of a detective story, with Forster's attempt to establish the facts behind the “mystery woman in black” who...