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Lady's Maid
Lady's Maid
Nov 6, 2025 12:16 PM

Author:Margaret Forster

Lady's Maid

London 1844, and a shy young woman has arrived to take up a new position in the grandeur of No. 50, Wimpole Street. Subtly and compellingly, Lady's Maid gives voice to Elizabeth Wilson's untold story, her complex relationship with her mistress, Elizabeth Barrett, and her dramatic role in the most famous elopement in history.

Reviews

From the viewpoint of Elizabeth Wilson... lady's maid, Margaret Forster retells the love story of Robert and Elizabeth Browning...Enthralling

—— Daily Telegraph

Compulsively readable... at each climax of the story, from the Browning's runaway romance to her own equally compromised and complicated marriage, the lady's maid speaks directly and at the last most movingly

—— Guardian

Passion, melodrama, pathos - and a happy ending. What more can you ask for?

—— Daily Mail

Movingly told... Wilson's pleasures, losses and disappointments in love are complicated and excellently understated, imagined as a contrast to the grand passions she has to serve

—— Times Literary Supplement

Accomplished, beautifully written... packed with discreet domestic detail

—— Financial Times

Fact and fiction are skilfully interwoven-beautifully done

—— Evening Standard

Absolute genius

—— Linda Grant , BBC Radio 4

A brave and unusual variation on a familiar theme... She modulates so finely between comedy and pathos, between psychology and physicality, that she conveys a sense of the richness of lived experience... Anne Enright has taken a great risk in writing this book, but she has brought it off superbly

—— Edmund Gordon , Daily Telegraph

Devastatingly good

—— Marie Claire

Forces us to look in the mirror... It is a discomfiting public examination of conscience, an exposé of our national shortcomings so recently in the limelight

—— Irish Independent

That's the Anne Enright voice all right - wry, disabused, reckless, candid, funny

—— Hermione Lee , Guardian

[Enright's] amazing ability to engage in lyric flights while keeping her feet on the ground, her way of returing to certain intimate details and of making jumpy little jokes, her habit of using colloquial phrasing to moor Grand Statements, and her rushing, exquisitely turned perceptions

—— Leo Robson , New Statesman

Where the novel compels is in the attendant disquisitions on memory and its rearrangements, both willed and unwilled; the blurring of boundaries, physical and temporal; the vivid presentation of all characters, major and minor...funny and forgiving

—— Elspeth Barker , Literary Review

The book...succeeds admirably, because Enright's characters are indeed so ordinary and fallible; they could quite easily be us

—— Ross Gilfillan , Daily Mail

This beautifully written, lyrical novel is a portrait of family tensions and the listless half-light in which a mistress must live

—— Jane Clinton , Sunday Express

Enright's prose has a brilliant physicality... Her observations of the Irish boom years are caustic and credible

—— Tom Gatti , The Times

Enright has taken a simple plot and produced a touching novel that examines the cost - and the compensations - of love. The heroine is both plausible and sympathetic, while the supporting cast is marshalled with skill, tenderness and humour

—— Max Davidson , Mail on Sunday

A simply and beautifully told tale

—— Lady

A simple tale of adultery and its consequences, told from a female perspective…Enright risks an over-familiarity of the subject matter, but she has brought it off superbly

—— Daily Telegraph

Enright is brilliant on the emotional battlefields and dance floors that exist between men and women… Smartingly funny and profoundly wise

—— Metro

The Forgotten Waltz delicately weaves the personal and political into a wry, tender exploration of family, marriage and the price of passion

—— Sorcha Hamilton , Irish Times

Brave, beautiful and quite brilliant

—— Joseph O’Connor , Irish Independent

A brilliant evocation of an ill-fated extramarital; affair, told with Enright’s customary sharp wit and knack for spotting a love-related cliché

—— Guardian, Holiday Reads:

The latest novel from the Booker Prize winning author has an emotional heft that belies the novel’s slender size

—— Sunday Business Post Ireland

a very human tale about passion, secrets and lies.

—— Reading Matters

An achingly brilliant piece of writing on passion and delusion. It's a pleasure to read from start to finish and reignites our love for fiction

—— Independent
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