This was a reading group suggestion and I wasn't particularly thrilled. It wasn't as bad as I expected. It's a long book and I did have to commit myself to 100 pages a day to get through it. I found that when I picked it up, I could read the 100 pages and quite enjoy it but once put down, I would not be enthused to pick it back up. It definately becomes far too long towards the end and I was just waiting for it to be over. But it does have its interesting side - in its portrait of Elizabeth Barret Browning, its description of a servant's life - always at the mercy of those who called themselves poor but weren't really. The description of depression at the end is particularly good. So for a book that is the kind that I normally avoid, it was OK. ( )

Margaret Forster’s brilliant novel Lady’s Maid introduces us to a young woman in service in mid-19th-century London. Yet Elizabeth Wilson is no ordinary maid. She is lady’s maid to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, the invalid daughter of a wealthy London gentleman, who has made a name for herself as a poetess. When Wilson enters Miss Elizabeth’s service in 1844, her mistress is withdrawn and easily tired, plagued by mysterious physical weakness and given to depression. As time passes, the patient Northern maid and her mercurial employer find a sympathy, deepened by Wilson’s reverence for books and by her compassion for the unworldly Miss Elizabeth. Gradually, Wilson convinces Miss Elizabeth to take turns in the park, coaxing colour into her face and strength into her limbs. Yet Wilson’s ministrations are nothing beside the impact that a new correspondent has on her mistress. Letters from the poet Mr Browning are soon the highlight of Miss Elizabeth’s day and Wilson finds herself drawn into a daring plan that will take her further from home than she ever dreamed possible. Amazingly rich, thoughtful and evocative, Forster’s novel introduced me to the full picture of the great Browning romance – seen through Wilson’s loyal but unsentimental eyes.

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2020/06/17/ladys-maid-1990-margaret-forster/ ( )

Lily Wilson comes to London as a young woman to be lady’s maid to Elizabeth Barrett, a charming invalid. Like everyone in the Browning family she soon adores “Ba” and becomes her companion as well as maid. She helps Elizabeth elope with Robert Browning and moves to Italy with the couple, devoting her life to them.

But this is her story, not Elizabeth’s, and she wonders if she will ever be more than a lady’s maid, ever have a life outside the Browning household. She’s sending money home to family and feels the responsibility keenly. The Brownings come off poorly in this portrait: when she asks for a raise commensurate with her experience and what other maids are making, they treat this as a betrayal of their friendship. She eventually marries another servant and they block her attempts to stay with him during their travels around Europe, and to keep their child in the household.

Yet something keeps her tied to Elizabeth and to Robert, even at her own expense, and the novel tries to work this out. Margaret Forster wrote a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning a few years before writing this novel, and my guess is that this is her attempt to make sense of their relationship.

It’s a great view of the lives of lower class servants, not just Lily but her family members and fellow servants. One had one’s place in the world and there were opportunities to move up or down, depending on hard work but mainly luck. The portrait of Lily is well done, too, though grim in parts. I thought it could have used some editing and went on too long, but it was certainly interesting. ( )

The story begins in London in 1844 when 23-year old Elizabeth Wilson becomes lady's maid to Elizabeth Barrett. A complex and, at times, difficult relationship develops, which only ends with the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861. The story follows the courtship of the Brownings, the dramatic elopement and their lives abroad, all the while with Wilson, as she is called throughout the book, attending her mistress' every need through good times and bad. Yet the Browings only provide the backdrop of this story, as this account gives voice to their maid Wilson, about the meaning of being in service, the sacrifices, the divide between servant and master and the stark contrasts between their lives and passions. Life's changing desires, for both maid and mistress, were at the heart of book, with many pleasures, losses and disappointments along the way.

Fact and fiction are threaded very closely together here; Margaret Forster has also written a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which I'm keen to read now. There is a lot of detail, and with very small print the book is actually quite a bit longer than 534 pages would suggest, but I enjoyed and savoured every last page of it. The writing reads more like a 19th century classic rather than a work of historical fiction by a contemporary author and it effortlessly transports the reader to that time and place. The character development was outstanding and very believable. It is compulsively readable and I just didn't want to put it down. The characters came to life on the page, human and flawed rather than glorified, but all the more real and accessible for it. This was, above all, a very moving read. ( )

A thoughtful historical novel that examines one of the basic plot clichés we normally take for granted - the relationship between employer and personal servant - and tries to provide an insight into what it might really mean to be the person paid to mop the fevered brow of a romantic cult figure and mend her clothes. Is it possible to have a close personal relationship with someone with the power to terminate your employment on a whim and cast you out into the street? where are the limits of your obligation to someone who's been working for you devotedly for years and then suddenly starts demanding a life of her own?

An interesting idea, evidently worked-up out of the leftovers of Forster's 1988 biography of Elizabeth Barrett, and written as a response to the challenge issued by Virginia Woolf in the six-page footnote about Wilson she included in Flush: a biography.

Forster seems to be straining a bit to make the later chapters compatible with the few known facts about Elizabeth Wilson's life after the period covered by the book. The narrative voice is also a bit patchy: Wilson's own voice, in her (fictional) letters, is very lively and develops quite convincingly with her increasing maturity and awareness of the world around her, but the third person narrative only feels sharply focussed in the scenes with Barrett. The further Wilson gets away from her mistress, the muddier and more tentative it becomes: probably this reflects the influence of Barrett's voice on Forster's style, as well as the lack of real historical data about Wilson's life away from the Brownings. If she'd been a purely fictional character, it might have been easier to get the dramatic balance right here and focus the reader's attention on the central story. The combination of these effects makes the book feel a little too long (given that Woolf only needed six pages for the same story, six hundred seems rather a lot...). But finding the right balance between historical record and invention is one of the classic problems of historical fiction, especially when you're dealing with a fairly recent period like the mid-19th century, where we know so many facts... ( )