Diary of an Ordinary Woman - Tapa dura

The extraordinary story of an extraordinary woman living in extraordinary times, told through the simple literary device of a personal journal. Millicent King is born in 1901 and begins her diary when she is 13 and Europe is on the cusp of the Great War. From wartime Britain the narrative moves to Rome in the 1920s and war again in the 1930s. There is love, loss and personal tragedy, all reflected in events in the wider world of contemporary politics. Millicent's story ends with her death in 1995, leaving behind an account of a life that is intended in various ways to mirror the life of everywoman in the 20th century. The publisher promises a marketing campaign that will exploit the ambiguous fictional status of this novel/memoir/autobiography.

Millicent King may seem to be an 'ordinary' woman - but actually she's not ordinary at all, and what's more she lives through the extraordinary events of the 20th century. Presented as the 'edited' journal of a real-life woman who was born in 1901 and died in 1995, this is fiction where every word rings true. Millie starts her diary at the age of 13, on the eve of the Great War. With vividness and a touching clearsightedness 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...She 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 teaching, social work and war work in the thirties. She has lovers and secret lovers, ambition and conviction. But then her life is turned upside down first by the death of her sister, leaving two small orphaned children for her to care for, and then by the death in a prison camp of the only man she ever truly loves. Here is quintessential twentieth-century woman brilliantly seen in close-up - independent, prickly, vulnerable, determined, coping with the large and small tragedies and upheavals of the century, and making it through. A triumph - not to mention, a brilliantly clever piece of 'memoir' writing which could have everyone fooled.