false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179156161m/880759.jpg 880759 4 <i>'Sometimes I have the feeling I'm going to turn out to be something queer when I grow up. Mathilda is so ordinary, she makes me feel special. I am not like her. I want to be different, I don't know how. Mathilda hates to be different. I am different already.'<b> Millicent King, 26 November 1914</b></i><br><br><i>'There was nothing ordinary about this woman. Indeed, I now wonder if there is any such thing as an ordinary life at all.'<br></i><b>Margaret Forster, Introduction to <i>Diary of an Ordinary Woman</i></b><br><br>Millicent King is an 'ordinary' woman living through extraordinary times in this brilliantly conceived piece of fictional memoir writing. <b>Diary of an Ordinary Woman</b> is the edited diary of fictional woman Millicent King (1901-1995). From the age of 13, on the eve of the Great War, Millicent King keeps her journals in a series of exercise books. The diary records the dramas of everyday life in an ordinary English family touched by war, tragedy and money troubles in the early decades of the century. With vividness, she records her brother's injury, her father's death from pneumonia, the family's bankruptcy, giving up college to take a soul-destroying job as a shop assistant. Millicent struggles to become a teacher, but wants more out of life. From Bohemian literary London to Rome in the twenties, her story moves on to social work, the General Strike, the Depression Era of the 1930's and the build-up to the Second World-War in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London. This is followed by her experience of the Swinging Sixties and Maggie Thatcher's Britain. She has proposals of marriage and secret lovers, ambition and optimism, but her life is turned upside down by wartime deaths. Here is twentieth-century woman in close-up coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives. Her ordinary life proves unexpectedly absorbing and, at times, extremely moving showing that, above all, the most ordinary lives are often extraordinary&#8230; 896306 2003 Diary of an Ordinary Woman total:41|5:18|4:14|3:9|2:0|1:0| 41 173 78 4 0 0 false false Sun Jan 20 16:08:44 -0800 2008 Sun Jan 20 16:08:58 -0800 2008 A Work in Progress.]]> 5 0 false false Tue Oct 28 13:29:26 -0700 2008 Tue Oct 28 13:30:00 -0700 2008 0 0 false false Mon Jul 14 07:19:05 -0700 2008 Mon Jul 14 07:19:05 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Sun Aug 30 11:56:55 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 30 12:00:36 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Fri Nov 20 14:14:41 -0800 2009 Fri Nov 20 14:14:41 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Tue Nov 17 12:12:56 -0800 2009 Sat Nov 21 09:53:59 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Wed Nov 04 02:50:50 -0800 2009 Wed Nov 04 02:50:50 -0800 2009 5 0 false false Mon Nov 02 14:40:46 -0800 2009 Mon Nov 02 14:40:46 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Wed Oct 21 18:54:26 -0700 2009 Wed Oct 21 18:54:26 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Wed Oct 21 08:29:02 -0700 2009 Wed Oct 21 08:29:02 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Sat Oct 10 10:43:21 -0700 2009 Sat Oct 10 10:43:21 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Mon Sep 07 13:24:32 -0700 2009 Mon Sep 07 13:24:32 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Sat Sep 05 22:04:21 -0700 2009 Sat Sep 05 22:04:21 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Fri Aug 21 13:36:31 -0700 2009 Fri Aug 21 13:36:31 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Mon Aug 17 05:41:19 -0700 2009 Mon Aug 17 05:41:19 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Wed Aug 12 22:43:04 -0700 2009 Wed Aug 12 22:43:04 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Wed Aug 12 14:16:05 -0700 2009 Wed Aug 12 14:16:05 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Tue Jul 28 09:48:58 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 30 10:40:16 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Mon Jul 20 03:36:32 -0700 2009 Mon Jul 20 04:04:52 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Thu Jul 16 05:53:25 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 16 05:53:44 -0700 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=880759