Three Women   by Peter Pfeiffer

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

It is not a first novel, but as the second by a forty-year writer, it is close.  It was made into a movie and spawned a hit song.  Margaret Forster has written dozens of books, most of them novels, since Georgy Girl.

 Forster was born into a middle-class home in Carlisle, Cumberland, England on May 25, 1938.  She developed an early interest in literature, especially the work of Charles Dickens and Charlotte and Emily Brontë.  A superior student, Forster was given a scholarship to attend Carlisle and County High School in 1949.  Eight years later, she received a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford University, where she studied history.  In 1960, she graduated from Oxford with a B.A. and relocated to London.  That same year, she married Hunter Davies, a journalist, with whom she later had three children. Forster taught at the Barnsbury Girls' School in London from 1961 to 1963.  She published her first novel, Dames Delight, in 1964. Georgy Girl (1965), her follow-up novel, was a commercial success and established Forster as a writer of popular fiction.  Forster adapted the novel into a screenplay with Peter Nicholas and the film adaptation was released in 1966.  Forster eventually became interested in the genre of biography and published her first biographical study, The Rash Adventurer: The Rise and Fall of Charles Edward Stuart, in 1973.  In recent years, she returned to novel writing and composed several well-received family memoirs.

Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004
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Compared with the movie, there is a sense that Forster did not experience the sixties as a hippy and therefore has a poor sense of how to create the setting.  She does so through mores such as promiscuity and pregnancy rather than vivid images of nightlife, sports cars, or motorscooter riding.

With a career that spans more than thirty years, Margaret Forster is most noted for her novels and works of literary biography.  Her novels tend to focus on family issues, some of which are loosely drawn on Forster's own experiences.  Hana Sambrook pointed out in Contemporary Novelists that in all of Forster's novels, she "is preoccupied with human relationships . . . with the impact of one person on another, with the possibility--or impossibility--of any real change in someone's character and outlook on life through emotional involvement with someone else."  Forster has also written a number of well-received biographies.  David Bordelon wrote in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "[Forster] brings to her biographies the dramatic sensibilities of a novelist as well as the analytic insight of a historian."

Forster's second novel, Georgy Girl, was a best-seller and was adapted into a screenplay in 1966. Over the next five years, Forster wrote a series of popular-fiction novels.  Forster herself referred to her earliest novels as "third rate," but Pamela Marsh wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that Miss Owen-Owen offers "good entertainment."  "[O]pportunities for comedy are right at Miss Forster's fingers and she richly exploits them," according to Marsh. Sambrook further pointed out that in these early novels, love "remains all-important to women, and Forster acknowledges this."  She noted a change in Forster's "perception of the impact of love" over the years as charted through her novels.

Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004.

The novel shows humanness in the author and that is that is a strong point.  It was published in 1965 when Forster was twenty-seven, the same age as George in the book, and it consists of what she knows, the one setting of London, and relatively few characters, usually in simple, one-on-one situations.  The novel doesn’t offer a lot of action, suspense, or other frills;; what it does provide, and this is more born out in the movie with its quicker action and less developed characters, is audacity—a written contract to have an affair, a mother who from birth scorns her child, and parents who marry and bear a child and then casually abandon the daughter and each other.  Changing morality turns out to be a strong statement about the cultural times of the sixties.

George—the Georgy name is much more endearing—is an outstanding character creation as are the parents James, Peg, Jos, and, to a lesser extent in the book, Meredith.  The book’s climax, which is far less clear or plausible in the movie, is when Jos leaves George and she, through the company of the even fatter and uglier Peg (who is barely in the film at all), realizes that it is for the best and she is her own woman anyway.  Peg is a useful foil.  The characters are great:  all are original and they are much deeper and realistic in the book than in the film.

The prose is choppy:  great at times and lacking at others.  There are also a lot of typos and other errors.  There are enough great scenes to display Forster as a promising, professional novelist even at age twenty-seven.  You can almost feel the writing improve as the novel moves along, from the way-too-long hairdresser scene at the outset to the witty, incisive dialogue between George and Jos which signals her coming of age.

Georgy Girl, by Margaret Forster, is excellent.

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The film was recently shown on the movie lover’s Turner Classic Movies network.  Lynn Redgrave, more full-figured than fat, and with a radiant charm and smile, creates the character who is the story.  Hers is a more optimistic and cheerful rendition of Georgy than that put into words by Margaret Forster, and the screenplay, co-written by Forster, lacks most of her physical ugliness, crying, depression, and long walks that are included throughout the novel.

Ms. Redgrave is younger, more attractive, and more appealing than “George” in the book.  In addition, James Mason’s James is more charismatic and less serious than the same character in the book; Alan Bates’ Jos is way funnier, much more energetic, and far more endearing than Ms. Forster’s Jos.  Charlotte Rampling’s Meredith is perhaps prettier, sans the hairy legs in the book, but her rendition is equally distinct, one-sided, and evil.  Georgy’s parents Ted and Doris, are minor characters in the movie as compared to the book.  Peg, the ultra-lonely downstairs neighbor, and George’s confidant, isn’t in the film at all.

Overall, the book is deeper and more realistic than the film; these are qualities that are rarer and perhaps less desirable in well-made, big budget, or star-filled movies.  In movies, great actors and actresses create characters who are likeable and who we want to see.  And in movies, a happy ending and an immediate good time are more important than in a novel.

At Georgy Girl you may find yourself laughing but intermittently, in discomfort or even stupefaction, asking yourself, "What are they doing in this movie? Do they know what they're doing?" They're obviously very clever, very talented, but what's going on?...Lack of control is made grotesquely cute.

  - Pauline Kael

Source:  www.TurnerClassicMovies.com

Even though it is shot in gloomy black and white, the movie is more hip and glorifying in its portrayal of London; perhaps one reason why it ages well is that it is a reminder of 1966 early hippie England. 

Lynn Redgrave is the younger sister of Vanessa and apparently was thrust into the role when her sibling withdrew.  She had already been, and has continued to be, an accomplished actress of her own but, as a tribute to the writing of the role, “this engaging actress never again got a comparably good role in movies” (per bio on www.imdb.com).

The film is strong mostly because it creates a likeable and memorable character in Georgy.  The host at Turner Classic Movies accurately referred to Georgy as a 1960’s Bridget Jones.

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Margaret Forster

Lynn Redgrave

Judith Durham

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