Saturday, February 13, 2016

My hero / Margaret Forster by Valerie Grove


Margaret Forster at home in London, 2001.

My hero:

Margaret Forster by Valerie Grove

Author and journalist Valerie Grove pays tribute to the novelist and biographer who died this week


Valerie Grove
Saturday 13 February 2016
M
argaret Forster was a cornerstone of my life for 40 years. Our first brief encounter was in 1970 at a George Weidenfeld party for her husband, writer and journalist Hunter Davies; she looked beautiful and bored. I’d just reviewed her latest book, Fenella Phizackerley, one of those light novels she effortlessly wrote every year: I’d loved it. “Did you?” she said scornfully. “It was rubbish.”

Flattery, to her, was “simpering”.
But six years later we met on Hampstead Heath as I was wheeling my first pram. And so I passed into her approved sphere of interest: a family, in the neighbourhood of NW5. Her curiosity about me and my eventual four children (and mine about her, and her three) forged a link that lasted until death. She was my confidante, and when she was in the Lake District, we were penfriends. She dedicated her novel, Lady’s Maid, about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Gateshead-born maid, Wilson, to me: “For Valerie Grove, another hard-working lass from the north-east.” I dedicated my first biography, Dear Dodie, to her.
Some found her intimidating, and she was: unsociable, solitary but intensely riveted by people. In the neighbourhood, she was the white witch to whom women came to confess: leaving a husband, having an abortion, a love child, a lesbian lover. Dramas happened, even at home. She never small-talked, often recoiled from kisses (except Hunter’s), could be crushing. When she was on the Arts Council, Richard Hoggart told her he was writing his memoirs. She asked “Why?”
She knew I preferred her biographies and memoirs to her fiction, and when I mentioned her latest novel, How to Measure a Cow, she hissed from her hospice bed: “Put. That. Down.” The last book I gave her was some JB Priestley essays, for a collection I’m editing. Within two days, she sent me, in a heartbreakingly shaky left hand, her favourites: two were “Old Age” and “Happiness”.



2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)