Margaret Penn Livres

The Foolish Virgin is a biographical sequel to Manchester Fourteen Miles, in which Margaret Penn describes her childhood in a Lancashire labourer's family at the turn of the century. The sequel begins where the earlier book leaves off with Hilda Winstanley (alias Margaret Penn) arriving in London to live with her real father's family. It is a moving and humorous account of a young girl's reaction to being taken from a highly traditional rural working-class family and plunged into the sophisticated and active life of a middle-class professional family. By the end of the book Hilda Winstanley is a complete member of a higher class; literate, cultured, politically aware as a liberal and suffragist and prepared to earn her living as a secretary. The three volumes were popular with reviewers and readers in the late 1940s but then fell out of print. They now hold new appeal, as an important record of a fascinating period of social history, as well as a moving and evocative account of one woman's life. Cambridge University Press is delighted to make them available for a new generation to enjoy.

Young Mrs Burton is the third in a series of autobiographical novels written by Margaret Penn, following on from Manchester Fourteen Miles and The Foolish Virgin. It tells of Hilda Winstanley's (Margaret Penn's) marriage to a journalist who became an officer in the First World War and returned from the war injured, a hero, alcoholic and unemployable. She had to turn, painfully, from being the ideal young upper-middle-class wife immured from the practicalities of living into being the family breadwinner. At a crisis of total destitution, she had to send her own children to be adopted: a traumatic - or possibly providential - repetition of her own history as related in Manchester Fourteen Miles. The three volumes were popular with reviewers and readers in the late 1940s but then fell out of print. They now hold new appeal, as an important record of a fascinating period of social history, as well as a moving and evocative account of one woman's life. Cambridge University Press is delighted to make them available for a new generation to enjoy.

Manchester Fourteen Miles was the inscription on the signpost outside 'Moss Ferry', the village where 'Hilda Winstanley' grew up before the First World War. The seemingly short distance from the capital of England's cotton industry was nonetheless the distance between one world and another. 'Moss Ferry' was a village which belonged to the old agricultural order, that is before cotton arrived. It had hardly changed, economically or socially for hundreds of years. Margaret Penn was Hilda Winstanley, taken into a farm labourer's family and brought up as one of them. She was an illegitimate child, her real father being a far richer man, and her sense of being different lent her powers of social observation a greater sharpness. The three volumes of this Lancashire childhood were popular with reviewers and readers in the late 1940s but then fell out of print. They now hold new appeal, as an important record of a fascinating period of social history, as well as a moving and evocative account of one woman's life. Cambridge University Press is delighted to make them available for a new generation to enjoy.