SOURCE: “Family Secrets,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 1996, p. 24.

In the following mixed review, Rodd explores the dominant themes of Shadow Baby.

The most persistent theme in Margaret Forster's fiction is family relationships, in all their difficult, idiosyncratic ordinariness. In Hidden Lives, the engrossing memoir-cum-biography she published last year, she traced the maternal line of her own family back to turn-of-the century northern England, using personal recollection, anecdote and dogged detective work to piece together a story that was simultaneously commonplace and riveting. In describing her female forebears' lives of poverty, domestic servitude, halting upward mobility and slowly burgeoning opportunity, she was also representing the twentieth-century experience of anonymous millions. The dramatic highlight of the book, however, centred on Forster's grandmother, who, it emerged, had given birth to a daughter some years before she met and married a gentle and prospering Carlisle butcher. Though he apparently knew and...