Diary of an Ordinary Woman by Margaret Forster

Author:Margaret Forster [Margaret Forster]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

8 March

I did something odd today. I’d read in the News Chronicle about an organisation called Mass-Observation which has been set up by three men, to record how ordinary people live. People are invited to record their day in detail for one day in a month, every month, and send in their account. The point is to build up a picture of our society. It appeals to me so much. There is no money involved, no payment, and no one need know where you live if you don’t want to reveal it. After all, what are my diaries but a record of the life of an ordinary woman. So I wrote off to the address and I am to send my first report next week. I have fixed on a Wednesday to do it. Robert is very amused by it. He says he can’t imagine of what use such reports could ever be, and that everyone will just make things up to make their report interesting. I said they won’t, or anyway I won’t. I love to know about people’s routines and habits and when I am on a bus or train I am always speculating about the other passengers and how their days go. Robert said such speculation never enters his head. Well, I said, that is the difference between us, and we left it at that. But I am looking forward to being a Mass Observer whatever he thinks.

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It is true that Millicent is intensely curious about strangers and that her diaries are full of sometimes quite minutely detailed observations and speculations. She is particularly interested in people she sits beside in buses, and often describes them right down to the condition of their fingernails or the design on a tie. Whether all this went into the stories she wrote at the period when she was working for Matthew Taylor is impossible to say, since none of them have survived, but I suspect she tried to make use of these vignettes in a creative way.

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