‘I have decided to write a journal. I mean to go on writing this for years and years, and it’ll be awfully amusing to read over later.’ It was Saturday 18 April 1925 and fifteen-year-old Jean Lucey Pratt was making a start on her first diary. Unlike most teenage girls, she actually kept it up: sixty years later, she’d produced over a million words, encompassing national, local and family politics, her ambitions, the frustrations of being a clever woman in a man’s world, her friendships and, most movingly, her constant desire for love. Simon Garfield, the editor of her journals, came across her work as a participant in the Mass Observation project, which gathered the experiences of ordinary people across the country during and after the Second World War. But Jean’s personal diaries go beyond the social history contained in her consciously ‘public’ journals. Here is an intelligent, smart, hopeful woman, longing to live to her full potential – but also a fallible, flawed human being who makes poor decisions, lacks courage, and manages to have whole love affairs in her imagination with someone she’s never actually spoken to. She is inspiring, exasperating and pitiful by turn: a fully-realised, articulate and hauntingly familiar personality. There is, I think, a little bit of Jean Lucey Pratt in all of us...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2019/02/10/a-notable-woman-jean-lucey-pratt/ ( )

It somehow seems harsh to say that I didn't really like this woman, after spending 600 pages with her, from her teenagerdom to her final ambulance ride at age 76... But I didn't like her, particularly in her 20s and 30s. She was man-crazy and felt that women were incomplete without marriage. I had been expecting the sexual escapades of a strong single woman. Jean has affairs mainly with married men who treat her abominably. She's dying to get married; her professed love of her independence and fantasized regrets at losing it seem lip-service, compared to the relentless drumbeat of longing, pining, cursing, wishing, hoping, for HIM to call. And so, she wants to get married; what of it? Does she DO anything to try to make that happen? Sleeping with a succession of married men doesn't seem to be a very efficient route to that version of happiness.
She becomes more tolerable as she enters her 40s. (Maybe I am just more sympathetic to my own age group.) She opens a book shop, and finally I see a glimpse of that strong independent woman I had hoped to read about.
It was funny how she kept daring to dream that someday, someone would read her diaries - her exact wish has come true. But you'd think that if she really did have hopes for publication someday, she would have written herself up in a more flattering light, and done a better writing job in general - she actually WAS a professional, published author.
Why did I stick with it - well, she wasn't hateful, just pathetic. I was also interested not just in reading a single woman's life story, but about life in the 20th century United Kingdom, including the war years. Ultimately, I did nearly shed a tear at Jean's death - I had spent a LOT of time with her by the end; and it was strange, abrupt, unfair-seeming, to have her carried off after her final entry, and declared dead some weeks later. "But that can't be all," one somehow feels... "She can't be just... gone?" Like in real life. :( ( )

This was an interesting glimpse into the life of a single lady born in 1909, all the way until her death in 1986. How she copes through WW2, work, writing and making ends meet, with no one really to share the highs and lows of life. It is hard not to feel some compassion for her. But I didn't really like her very much - vain, quite selfish with a really high opinion of herself. Besides getting her writing published, her aim in life was to find a husband and failing that a lover and it didn't matter much if he was married or already had a girlfriend. Sadly for her she was born when there was a shortage of men, when women felt they had to be someone's wife. For an intelligent woman she made some silly decisions, especially when it came to her beloved cats whom she let breed as they felt like it, didn't seem to flea them and kept them going far longer than she should have done. Perhaps they did things differently in those days! I did like the book but had to skim read parts of the less interesting bits. ( )