Margaret Forster, who began her literary career writing fiction, brings to her biographies the dramatic sensibilities of a novelist as well as the analytic insight of a historian. Her biographies, including books on William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Daphne du Maurier, are extensions of her fiction: Forster considers both realms of experimentation where techniques of narrative, characterization, and point of view are used, as she notes in a 1992 letter, to "catch the essence of the person and the spirit of their times." She employs these techniques whether the "person" is a character in a novel or the subject of a biography.

Forster was born in Carlisle, Cumberland, England, on 25 May 1938; her parents, Arthur Gordon, a mechanic, and Lilian Hind Forster, a housewife, provided Forster with a working-class upbringing. Though her parents seemed content and Forster cared for both of them, she nonetheless felt that her mother's...