This memoir takes in three generations of Margaret Forster's family, beginning with her grandmother, who took to her grave the secrets of the first 23 years of her life. The stories surrounding the grandmother have attained the status of family myth, and in Hidden Lives, she looks at where the truth might lie. Was the mysterious woman who interrupted her wake really another daughter? How had this woman lived round the corner for so long without acknowledgement? The search for answers takes Margaret Forster on a journey into her family's past. She not only examines her grandmother's life, but also the lives of her mother Lilian, and of herself - three generations of women born and brought up in radically different circumstances. Margaret Ann was a domestic servant before she married a butcher and settled down to have a family. Their eldest daughter, Lily, was a bright child, able to go to the Higher Grade School and get a good job as a clerk, but when she married she was obliged to relinquish her career and settle for family life. When her daughter Margaret's time came, she was able to take advantage of the changing times, go to the High School, to Oxford University and to move away from her home town of Carlisle to establish her writing career and family in the south.