If you spent any time in London before Google maps, you would have used a London A-Z map to find your way around. I lived in London for nearly four years in my early 20s, and the A-Z was one of the first books I bought. I still have it. A few years ago, I discovered this biography of the A-Z’s creator, Phyllis Pearsall, thanks to LibraryThing. I was intrigued to learn that the A-Z was the creation of this woman, and I wanted to learn more about it.

The book wasn’t what I expected. Pearsall’s biographer focused more on her childhood and young adulthood than on the creation of the A-Z and her professional life. Some mention of her family background was necessary, as Pearsall probably would not have come up with the idea for the A-Z had her father not been in the map-making business. (He was not a cartographer, but he owned a cartographic company.) However, the book disproportionately focuses on the early half of Phyllis’s life and her dysfunctional family.

The author’s foreword includes a troubling passage:

I have written the truth according to Phyllis. For I am convinced that every story, every memory and every encounter that she described, she believed to be true. Of course, when starting with such a shaky foundation, I have not felt uncomfortable interweaving elements of fiction into fact. But if truth be known, my fiction turned out to be much more mundane than her ‘fact’. If there is a scene, or a word, or a character, you believe to be too fantastical, it is likely they are real.

In the absence of footnotes or end notes, it is impossible to separate fact from fiction (or the author’s fiction from Phyllis’s conflicting accounts of her own life). Recommended with reservations as a book about an influential woman whose work benefited hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom were likely unaware of her existence. ( )

Mrs. P’s Journey explores the life of Phyllis Pearsall, the woman who created the first* A-Z map of London. It’s a biography that takes a detailed look at the lives of her parents, so perhaps ‘family biography’ would be a better description. Phyllis Pearsall’s father was self-centred, bad-tempered and obsessed with proving himself by achieving monetary worth, an ambition that led him to start a map-making company, a business ownership almost ridiculously at odds with his impatient temperament. Her mother was, unfortunately, an independent spirit with many great qualities who nevertheless ruined herself against the rocks of her first and second marriage… from this quagmire of angry, often embarrassing background, Phyllis emerged as an intelligent, motivated, capable young woman with an artistic gift and her father’s determinedness, her personal motto becoming on we go.

This is a fantastically interesting story, from both a human and historical viewpoint, moving and for the most part, well told. There are two flaws in Hartley’s approach, and they spoil surprisingly little… the first is the author’s inability to stick to a timeline. I’m not talking about an occasional interjection of an earlier anecdote; it’s more as though Sarah Hartley has a terminal case of the ‘oh-that-reminds-me’s, peppering any given scene with back-story and hardly caring whether things are told in chronological order; nothing is set up before-hand, which gives the writing a random if adventurous feel, quite well suited to its subject but not very comfortable for the reader who must pay closer than usual attention not to what is happening, but when.

The other flaw, not really obvious until you do some research, is that Phyllis herself was an ‘imaginative’ memoir writer, shall we say, and the author of Mrs. P’s Journey hasn’t even stuck to the facts therein religiously. There’s a line where biography becomes biographical fiction, and I sometimes felt Ms. Hartley straying towards it.

Despite that, I enjoyed this book. It described a life that I found fascinating and admirable; ‘fearless Phyllis’ might have inherited her father’s sense of the dramatic, but she tempered it with reasonableness, friendliness, and incredible achievement.

*Sort of. The first marketable A-Z, anyway. ( )

Everyone in London, and most of the visitors to this city, use the 'A-Z of London' without any idea of the remarkable woman who devised the idea of such a book, mapped the whole city and singlehandedly started a whole branch of publishing. This is the story of that women, Phyllis Pearsall. ( )