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A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt
In April 1925, Jean Lucey Pratt began writing a journal. She continued to write until just a few days before her death in 1986, producing well over a million words in 45 exercise books over the course of her lifetime. For sixty years, no one had an inkling of her diaries' existence, and they have remained unpublished until now.
Jean wrote about anything that amused, inspired or troubled her, laying bare every aspect of her life with aching honesty, infectious humour, indelicate gossip and heartrending hopefulness. She recorded her yearnings and her disappointments in love, from schoolgirl crushes to disastrous adult affairs. She documented the loss of a tennis match, her unpredictable driving, catty friends, devoted cats and difficult guests. With Jean we live through the tumult of the Second World War and the fears of a nation. We see Britain hurtling through a period of unbridled transformation, and we witness the shifting landscape for women in society.
As Jean's words propel us back in time, A Notable Woman becomes a unique slice of living, breathing British history and a revealing private chronicle of life in the twentieth century.
Jean wrote about anything that amused, inspired or troubled her, laying bare every aspect of her life with aching honesty, infectious humour, indelicate gossip and heartrending hopefulness. She recorded her yearnings and her disappointments in love, from schoolgirl crushes to disastrous adult affairs. She documented the loss of a tennis match, her unpredictable driving, catty friends, devoted cats and difficult guests. With Jean we live through the tumult of the Second World War and the fears of a nation. We see Britain hurtling through a period of unbridled transformation, and we witness the shifting landscape for women in society.
As Jean's words propel us back in time, A Notable Woman becomes a unique slice of living, breathing British history and a revealing private chronicle of life in the twentieth century.
712 pages, Hardcover
First published November 5, 2015
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April 24, 2020
It is #wordsofcomfort to hear how a woman survived war and kept her spirits up. Jean Lucey Pratt's diaries were kept as part of the British government's Mass Observation Project, and editor Simon Garfield helps us see into this fascination moment in history and how it shaped the lives of ordinary women and men.
October 10, 2015
Author Simon Garfield first came across Jean Lucey Pratt when he was looking for war diaries, from the Mass Observation archive, for a previous book. He renamed her ‘Maggie Joy Blunt’ for that project, but now has edited the diaries of her whole life, from when she first began her diary in 1925 at the age of just 15, until her death in 1986. I have to admit to a feeling of discomfort if reading the private diaries of an individual, but if you have the same feelings then you can safely put them aside. For her entire life, Jean was an aspiring writer and often remarks that she hopes her diaries will be preserved, and even published. As such, I felt great pleasure in reading the words she wrote not just for herself, but for posterity.
Jean was born in 1909 and began writing the journal which would continue for sixty years in 1925. This book incorporates about one sixth of the written material and much of it, but not all, does centre on the war years, when she was in her early thirties. We begin with childhood crushes and the remarriage of her widowed father, as Jean considers becoming an architect like her father and worries about her performances at the tennis club. These early years really give us a sense of Jean’s personality and, although obviously she changes, there are some traits that stay with her. She has a fear of being suburbanised and narrow minded, she yearns for love and encouragement and she dreams of romance and writing.
Without doubt, Jean longed always to learn and experience the most from life. She enjoyed travel and always embraced the most from every holiday, friendship and romance. However, she was also often crippled by self doubt, shyness and insecurity. Despite her personal worries though, she did her best to enjoy every experience. She transfers from architecture to journalism, travels to Jamaica, Russia and even Germany in 1936 and was interested in politics, art and literature. Although she did her best to remain upbeat and worshipped her elder brother, she suffered from the petty humiliations of life – being unable to come up with a partner for a dance or foursome, for example. As such, I really warmed to Jean for exposing her fears, cheered even her minor triumphs and suffered her self-doubts alongside her.
Some readers may have come across Jean before, from Simon Garfield’s previous compilation of war diaries and a large part of this book does contain entries from those years – from early worries about the possibility of war, through the blitz and her concern that she must ‘do something’ to help. She is also surprised at how life goes on in London, despite the bombing and muses on how, when she reads Katharine Mansfield’s journals, she is astonished at how she stood aloof from events in WWI. Obviously, this is something she is unable to do, as she is personally impacted by everything from bombs to rationing and it does really does illustrate life on the Home Front during the war.
Even during wartime though, Jean is always concerned with the private as well as world events. She is constantly assessing eligible men and longs for marriage. This then is the story of the private, as well as the public. Anxieties, frustrations, affairs of the heart, her feelings of failure and her successes – the little victories, delight over small windfalls and her own frustration at failing to feel content will all resonate with readers. I am delighted I read this diary and felt great affection for the romantic Jean. It was a shame that she was often so hard on herself, but I am sure she would be so pleased to find that readers were finally discovering her. Lastly, I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.
Jean was born in 1909 and began writing the journal which would continue for sixty years in 1925. This book incorporates about one sixth of the written material and much of it, but not all, does centre on the war years, when she was in her early thirties. We begin with childhood crushes and the remarriage of her widowed father, as Jean considers becoming an architect like her father and worries about her performances at the tennis club. These early years really give us a sense of Jean’s personality and, although obviously she changes, there are some traits that stay with her. She has a fear of being suburbanised and narrow minded, she yearns for love and encouragement and she dreams of romance and writing.
Without doubt, Jean longed always to learn and experience the most from life. She enjoyed travel and always embraced the most from every holiday, friendship and romance. However, she was also often crippled by self doubt, shyness and insecurity. Despite her personal worries though, she did her best to enjoy every experience. She transfers from architecture to journalism, travels to Jamaica, Russia and even Germany in 1936 and was interested in politics, art and literature. Although she did her best to remain upbeat and worshipped her elder brother, she suffered from the petty humiliations of life – being unable to come up with a partner for a dance or foursome, for example. As such, I really warmed to Jean for exposing her fears, cheered even her minor triumphs and suffered her self-doubts alongside her.
Some readers may have come across Jean before, from Simon Garfield’s previous compilation of war diaries and a large part of this book does contain entries from those years – from early worries about the possibility of war, through the blitz and her concern that she must ‘do something’ to help. She is also surprised at how life goes on in London, despite the bombing and muses on how, when she reads Katharine Mansfield’s journals, she is astonished at how she stood aloof from events in WWI. Obviously, this is something she is unable to do, as she is personally impacted by everything from bombs to rationing and it does really does illustrate life on the Home Front during the war.
Even during wartime though, Jean is always concerned with the private as well as world events. She is constantly assessing eligible men and longs for marriage. This then is the story of the private, as well as the public. Anxieties, frustrations, affairs of the heart, her feelings of failure and her successes – the little victories, delight over small windfalls and her own frustration at failing to feel content will all resonate with readers. I am delighted I read this diary and felt great affection for the romantic Jean. It was a shame that she was often so hard on herself, but I am sure she would be so pleased to find that readers were finally discovering her. Lastly, I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.
January 10, 2016
So many times I wanted to give Jean a massive hug and so many others I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. Lots to love about this book:
1. That many of Jean's experiences and emotional states are relevant today, and I identified with massively (especially when it came to men).
2. It was so wonderful to see the subtle changes of a woman through from her twenties through to her sixties.
3. Her humour. Her sense of bathos. Some terrible world event has just happened. And then, oh, one of her cats threw up.
4. How many tragic, funny, sad moments there were. So many perfect ones that I had to keep reading them out to my husband, who was reading The End of Vandalism at the time and loving it, but still very patiently put his book down to listen to me.
5. The editing. Obviously this is hard to judge because I don't know exactly what was cut, but nothing jarred. It could have been as if Jean had written only these pages, although I believe a lot more was edited out.
4.5 stars.
1. That many of Jean's experiences and emotional states are relevant today, and I identified with massively (especially when it came to men).
2. It was so wonderful to see the subtle changes of a woman through from her twenties through to her sixties.
3. Her humour. Her sense of bathos. Some terrible world event has just happened. And then, oh, one of her cats threw up.
4. How many tragic, funny, sad moments there were. So many perfect ones that I had to keep reading them out to my husband, who was reading The End of Vandalism at the time and loving it, but still very patiently put his book down to listen to me.
5. The editing. Obviously this is hard to judge because I don't know exactly what was cut, but nothing jarred. It could have been as if Jean had written only these pages, although I believe a lot more was edited out.
4.5 stars.
March 26, 2016
This is going to be a stream-of-consciousness review I think, like the book. Jean's joys and pains in her early 20s are so earnest. She has hopeless fantasies about entirely unsuitable men, suffers the attentions of equally unsuitable ones, wishes she was rich and beautiful. She still shows wit though. In 1932 she visits her brother and his new wife and baby in Jamaica, and is bored to death. On the ship home:
Writing to her brother when she gets home:
Doesn't that remind you of real life versus Facebook status updates?
Th striking thing about Jean in her late 20s and early 30s, and evidently something she had in common with many other women, is her desperation to find a husband. Or failing that, at least a lover. Its hard to comprehend nowadays the widespread belief that if a woman was not a wife and mother, her life had no purpose. Jean was an intelligent woman, but she is extraordinarily gullible and self-deceiving where men are concerned, just because of her desperation. It seems that many men, married or otherwise, were perfectly aware of the situation of these "spare women" and took advantage of it in the obvious way. It makes it worse that most of the men she meets are work colleagues (she has few opportunities to meet men elsewhere), so she has to keep facing them after the relationship has gone wrong. What a bunch of cads and bounders she hooks up with!
Late update: I finished the book a week ago but haven't had time to update the review. Jean kept her diary more sparingly in the later part of her life. Her world seems to shrink, she loses touch with friends, has no more "romantic" (not) adventures, suffers from depression, has constant financial worries as most of the time she doesn't work and her capital shrinks rapidly. But she does, just, manage to make a go of running a little bookshop in her Buckinghamshire village, and eventually even buys her beloved Wee Cottage. Overall, this is just a fascinating peek into all the mundane little details that make up a life.
I am hating all these lousy old men, old men who want to make love to you. I would like to wring their necks and slap their faces, but I don't. I encourage them by holding their hands, and then offend them by not trotting off to some dark corner after dinner to be slobbered over.
Writing to her brother when she gets home:
The voyage was on the whole enormous fun. I was the only young unmarried female on board, and what a time I had...they were all damn decent to me and danced divinely.
Doesn't that remind you of real life versus Facebook status updates?
Th striking thing about Jean in her late 20s and early 30s, and evidently something she had in common with many other women, is her desperation to find a husband. Or failing that, at least a lover. Its hard to comprehend nowadays the widespread belief that if a woman was not a wife and mother, her life had no purpose. Jean was an intelligent woman, but she is extraordinarily gullible and self-deceiving where men are concerned, just because of her desperation. It seems that many men, married or otherwise, were perfectly aware of the situation of these "spare women" and took advantage of it in the obvious way. It makes it worse that most of the men she meets are work colleagues (she has few opportunities to meet men elsewhere), so she has to keep facing them after the relationship has gone wrong. What a bunch of cads and bounders she hooks up with!
Late update: I finished the book a week ago but haven't had time to update the review. Jean kept her diary more sparingly in the later part of her life. Her world seems to shrink, she loses touch with friends, has no more "romantic" (not) adventures, suffers from depression, has constant financial worries as most of the time she doesn't work and her capital shrinks rapidly. But she does, just, manage to make a go of running a little bookshop in her Buckinghamshire village, and eventually even buys her beloved Wee Cottage. Overall, this is just a fascinating peek into all the mundane little details that make up a life.
November 2, 2024
"A NOTABLE WOMAN: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt" traces out the arc of an Englishwoman whose life spanned most of the 20th century. Jean Lucey Pratt began writing a journal in the spring of 1925 (when she was 15) and, in varying degrees, kept at it for the next 61 years, when Death intervened.
As someone who has kept diaries for years, I would like to cite the following passages from Jean's journals that impressed me ---
From Sunday, 25 August 1940:
"Yesterday, I received a telegram from brother Pooh [his real name is Leslie, an engineer who was employed by Cable & Wireless for years; he's 8 years Jean's senior] in the Suez to say that he and his family were well but mails were badly delayed and he wanted news. i cabled a message back and have today sent a letter. I parted with it with a pang of fear. What is to be its route, its adventures, and will it ever arrive at its destination?
"It is sometimes difficult to believe in this war. ... From the sultry sky came the sound of one far-off plane. Churchill has made another impressive speech this week. He is undoubtedly a figure in our history. Trotsky has been murdered in Mexico. Our belated account of recent air battles has impressed America who had been given the impression by swift German reports of a shattered and demoralised Britain.
"Animals must be suffering more than we are in this war. Proper food for them is difficult to get. Ginger Tom has been looking wretched for weeks, and in desperation at the sores around his head and his thinness I took him to the vet yesterday. I was told he was not being fed adequately. He needs quantities of raw, red meat. Raw, red meat. I wheedled some pieces from the butcher but he told me we were liable to two years' imprisonment!..."
On Monday, 28 June 1948, Jean speaks to the future when she states ---
"I wish I could capture everything, everything and imprison it here. But then it would die of its own weight, and I want this journal to live. ..."
What is remarkable about this book is that the reader gets full access to a shy, sensitive, self-effacing woman who nurtured ambitions to be a writer, embarked on one career path after completing her formal education (i.e. working in her father's architecture company in the early 1930s) and later took on a couple of somewhat divergent career journeys, before becoming the owner of a small bookstore in a village community near London where she lived for almost 50 years.
Jean also sheds considerable light on what proved to be for her a rather frustrated love life with a number of men, many of whom tended to take her for granted. Her frankness on this subject - which was elaborated upon by her at considerable length during the late 1930s and the 1940s --- comes across as so utterly modern. In particular, her feelings about sex
I enjoyed reading this book (which contains photos of Jean and her family, and friends) and seeing through it how it is that all our individual lives -- whether any of us chooses to write about them --- form an integral part of life on this planet Earth.
As someone who has kept diaries for years, I would like to cite the following passages from Jean's journals that impressed me ---
From Sunday, 25 August 1940:
"Yesterday, I received a telegram from brother Pooh [his real name is Leslie, an engineer who was employed by Cable & Wireless for years; he's 8 years Jean's senior] in the Suez to say that he and his family were well but mails were badly delayed and he wanted news. i cabled a message back and have today sent a letter. I parted with it with a pang of fear. What is to be its route, its adventures, and will it ever arrive at its destination?
"It is sometimes difficult to believe in this war. ... From the sultry sky came the sound of one far-off plane. Churchill has made another impressive speech this week. He is undoubtedly a figure in our history. Trotsky has been murdered in Mexico. Our belated account of recent air battles has impressed America who had been given the impression by swift German reports of a shattered and demoralised Britain.
"Animals must be suffering more than we are in this war. Proper food for them is difficult to get. Ginger Tom has been looking wretched for weeks, and in desperation at the sores around his head and his thinness I took him to the vet yesterday. I was told he was not being fed adequately. He needs quantities of raw, red meat. Raw, red meat. I wheedled some pieces from the butcher but he told me we were liable to two years' imprisonment!..."
On Monday, 28 June 1948, Jean speaks to the future when she states ---
"I wish I could capture everything, everything and imprison it here. But then it would die of its own weight, and I want this journal to live. ..."
What is remarkable about this book is that the reader gets full access to a shy, sensitive, self-effacing woman who nurtured ambitions to be a writer, embarked on one career path after completing her formal education (i.e. working in her father's architecture company in the early 1930s) and later took on a couple of somewhat divergent career journeys, before becoming the owner of a small bookstore in a village community near London where she lived for almost 50 years.
Jean also sheds considerable light on what proved to be for her a rather frustrated love life with a number of men, many of whom tended to take her for granted. Her frankness on this subject - which was elaborated upon by her at considerable length during the late 1930s and the 1940s --- comes across as so utterly modern. In particular, her feelings about sex
I enjoyed reading this book (which contains photos of Jean and her family, and friends) and seeing through it how it is that all our individual lives -- whether any of us chooses to write about them --- form an integral part of life on this planet Earth.
January 29, 2021
I remember reading an article about A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt when it was first released, and have had my eye out for a copy ever since. I ended up finding a gorgeous hardback edition on a remaindered books website, and read its 700 pages over the space of a few days.
I love reading journals; they convey an excellent social history. Jean Lucey Pratt's are no exception. She began to keep a diary at the age of 15, and continued - in 45 exercise books purchased from Woolworths for sixpence each - until a few weeks before her death in 1986. The output is astonishing, and she wrote over a million words during her lifetime. Most of her journals were personal ones, which her family and friends were unaware of, but she also kept a specific journal during the Second World War. Pratt also contributed to the Mass Observation Project, which began in 1937, and aimed to capture everyday life in Britain.
Pratt was born in Wembley in 1909, and lived for most of her life in a small and ramshackle Buckinghamshire cottage, named Wee Cottage. She looked after her niece, Babs, for some years whilst the girl's parents were stationed abroad, but largely lived alone, her only company her cats. Pratt had a fascinating life; she trained as an architect, worked as a publicist and journalist, and went on to run a small bookshop in a street in Slough. She specialised in cat books, and continued to send these out to customers for many years after her 'retirement'. As Garfield notes in his introduction, 'what she really wanted to do was write and garden and care for her cats.'
In her teenage years, Pratt touchingly addresses portions of her journal to her late mother. She laments over her father's choice of new wife, in Ethel, a woman of whom she is suspicious from the outset. In 1925, Pratt sweetly kicks off with a list of her 'beaus', which have been written in a secret code. One gets a feel for her character, and for what matters the most to her, straight away. She is in touch with herself throughout.
Although Pratt hints at possible publication following her death, she makes it clear that at present, the journals are for her alone: 'And why have I that feeling at the back of my mind that no one will ever read this? But if anyone does read this - if you ever do - Reader please be kind to me! I am only 16 at present, and just realising life and beginning to think for myself. It's all very chilling in its strange newness.' She is candid and honest, and rather frank regarding taboo subjects, like her sex life. She is a very modern woman. In 1927, for instance, she writes: 'I don't want to get married - not at least to the struggling domesticated life which seems to belong to every man I know.' Later, in 1931, she comments: 'Even to my socialistic mind I think it would be better to be married - more convenient, double rooms being usually cheaper than singles.'
From the earliest entries, too, her writing is gorgeous. In April 1925, on a trip to Torquay, Pratt reflects: 'We came back along the coast... And I felt tired and sad and a little exhausted, but the level, smooth stretch of sea peeping between the graceful lines of the cliffs seemed to comfort the innermost recesses of my soul. And when we lost sight of it behind high hedgerows I ached for one more sight of it.' There is a lot of humour in A Notable Woman, too; in 1926, for instance, she writes of a new pair of cream silk stockings that she 'unfortunately wore them for tennis yesterday and made irrevocable ladders.'
She has all of the usual teenage worries, but discusses them in a manner which is full of wisdom. We really see her grow - and flourish - as time moves on. I loved the way in which she mixes social commentary with what is happening in her own life; this begins far before the Second World War period, which is comprehensively covered. Throughout, Pratt is philosophical; in 1933, she asks herself: 'What is one to do when one seems possessed of ideas and ideals too big for one's meagre capabilities?'
Until A Notable Woman was published, nobody had read Pratt's journals. Their publication is a gift; I dare anyone to not be entirely charmed by Pratt, and her words. They are, as Garfield comments, 'a revelation and a joy'. Garfield goes on to say that when friends would ask about Pratt's writing style, he could think of nothing better than 'Virginia Woolf meets Caitlin Moran' - two authors whom I very much enjoy. Had I not already been intrigued by learning more about Pratt, this comment certainly would have made me pick up a copy of A Notable Woman.
I would love to read the rest of Pratt's original journals; this edition contains only around a sixth of what Pratt penned. Her observations throughout are so clear, and I was fascinated to learn about what filled her days. I cannot recommend A Notable Woman highly enough; it is filled with the colourful, descriptive, vivid, and heartfelt reminiscences of a fascinating character, who lives her entire life with hope and warmth.
I love reading journals; they convey an excellent social history. Jean Lucey Pratt's are no exception. She began to keep a diary at the age of 15, and continued - in 45 exercise books purchased from Woolworths for sixpence each - until a few weeks before her death in 1986. The output is astonishing, and she wrote over a million words during her lifetime. Most of her journals were personal ones, which her family and friends were unaware of, but she also kept a specific journal during the Second World War. Pratt also contributed to the Mass Observation Project, which began in 1937, and aimed to capture everyday life in Britain.
Pratt was born in Wembley in 1909, and lived for most of her life in a small and ramshackle Buckinghamshire cottage, named Wee Cottage. She looked after her niece, Babs, for some years whilst the girl's parents were stationed abroad, but largely lived alone, her only company her cats. Pratt had a fascinating life; she trained as an architect, worked as a publicist and journalist, and went on to run a small bookshop in a street in Slough. She specialised in cat books, and continued to send these out to customers for many years after her 'retirement'. As Garfield notes in his introduction, 'what she really wanted to do was write and garden and care for her cats.'
In her teenage years, Pratt touchingly addresses portions of her journal to her late mother. She laments over her father's choice of new wife, in Ethel, a woman of whom she is suspicious from the outset. In 1925, Pratt sweetly kicks off with a list of her 'beaus', which have been written in a secret code. One gets a feel for her character, and for what matters the most to her, straight away. She is in touch with herself throughout.
Although Pratt hints at possible publication following her death, she makes it clear that at present, the journals are for her alone: 'And why have I that feeling at the back of my mind that no one will ever read this? But if anyone does read this - if you ever do - Reader please be kind to me! I am only 16 at present, and just realising life and beginning to think for myself. It's all very chilling in its strange newness.' She is candid and honest, and rather frank regarding taboo subjects, like her sex life. She is a very modern woman. In 1927, for instance, she writes: 'I don't want to get married - not at least to the struggling domesticated life which seems to belong to every man I know.' Later, in 1931, she comments: 'Even to my socialistic mind I think it would be better to be married - more convenient, double rooms being usually cheaper than singles.'
From the earliest entries, too, her writing is gorgeous. In April 1925, on a trip to Torquay, Pratt reflects: 'We came back along the coast... And I felt tired and sad and a little exhausted, but the level, smooth stretch of sea peeping between the graceful lines of the cliffs seemed to comfort the innermost recesses of my soul. And when we lost sight of it behind high hedgerows I ached for one more sight of it.' There is a lot of humour in A Notable Woman, too; in 1926, for instance, she writes of a new pair of cream silk stockings that she 'unfortunately wore them for tennis yesterday and made irrevocable ladders.'
She has all of the usual teenage worries, but discusses them in a manner which is full of wisdom. We really see her grow - and flourish - as time moves on. I loved the way in which she mixes social commentary with what is happening in her own life; this begins far before the Second World War period, which is comprehensively covered. Throughout, Pratt is philosophical; in 1933, she asks herself: 'What is one to do when one seems possessed of ideas and ideals too big for one's meagre capabilities?'
Until A Notable Woman was published, nobody had read Pratt's journals. Their publication is a gift; I dare anyone to not be entirely charmed by Pratt, and her words. They are, as Garfield comments, 'a revelation and a joy'. Garfield goes on to say that when friends would ask about Pratt's writing style, he could think of nothing better than 'Virginia Woolf meets Caitlin Moran' - two authors whom I very much enjoy. Had I not already been intrigued by learning more about Pratt, this comment certainly would have made me pick up a copy of A Notable Woman.
I would love to read the rest of Pratt's original journals; this edition contains only around a sixth of what Pratt penned. Her observations throughout are so clear, and I was fascinated to learn about what filled her days. I cannot recommend A Notable Woman highly enough; it is filled with the colourful, descriptive, vivid, and heartfelt reminiscences of a fascinating character, who lives her entire life with hope and warmth.
January 5, 2016
This book has got my 2016 reading off to a very good start.
Simon Garfield has done a fantastic job of editing Mass Observation diaries and I'd already met Jean Lucey Pratt in some of his earlier books where she appears under the pen name Maggie Joy Blunt.
This particular book contains Jean's more personal journals from 1925 (when she was 15) until a few days before her death in 1986.
Nearly 750 pages and always so entertaining! Jean writes about her life with such honestly and frankness.
Poor woman, her love life is disastrous as she lurches from one unsuitable relationship to another. She laughs at herself, and we laugh along too, and yet at the same time she is open about being sad and lonely and has such an intense desire to be loved and wanted.
For instance on VE Day, 1945 with everyone else seemingly out celebrating she says "I feel intensely lonely and that it is somehow my fault"
As each new man hoves into view in the journal pages you can quickly tell it is all going to end in tears.
For instance F 'has ugly hands, a wizened, shrivelled appearance and a small, vicious mouth'. Yet she has reached 'any port in a storm' time in her desperate search for a loving companion.
Further dalliances with married men are heart breaking - throwing herself into unsuitable relationships and then constantly being let down.
Writing these candid journals help ease her loneliness - she's open about that too.
Jean always wanted to write, and several times she addresses possible 'future readers'. I loved spending a few days with her. Highly recommended.
Simon Garfield has done a fantastic job of editing Mass Observation diaries and I'd already met Jean Lucey Pratt in some of his earlier books where she appears under the pen name Maggie Joy Blunt.
This particular book contains Jean's more personal journals from 1925 (when she was 15) until a few days before her death in 1986.
Nearly 750 pages and always so entertaining! Jean writes about her life with such honestly and frankness.
Poor woman, her love life is disastrous as she lurches from one unsuitable relationship to another. She laughs at herself, and we laugh along too, and yet at the same time she is open about being sad and lonely and has such an intense desire to be loved and wanted.
For instance on VE Day, 1945 with everyone else seemingly out celebrating she says "I feel intensely lonely and that it is somehow my fault"
As each new man hoves into view in the journal pages you can quickly tell it is all going to end in tears.
For instance F 'has ugly hands, a wizened, shrivelled appearance and a small, vicious mouth'. Yet she has reached 'any port in a storm' time in her desperate search for a loving companion.
Further dalliances with married men are heart breaking - throwing herself into unsuitable relationships and then constantly being let down.
Writing these candid journals help ease her loneliness - she's open about that too.
Jean always wanted to write, and several times she addresses possible 'future readers'. I loved spending a few days with her. Highly recommended.
October 10, 2016
Simply magnificent. Jean Lucey Pratt was a lifelong diarist who also contributed to the Mass Observation project. She was my age during WW2 and her diaries of course focus on those events but also her daily life and concerns, her dreams, anxieties and longings which for the most part remained unchanged by the war and all its dramas and hardships. She was still a woman who was figuring out who she was and what she wanted, and often pondered about all the what ifs, missed chances and the might-have-beens. It made me realise that the only thing that distinguishes each decade in history is technology - the human heart, with all its wants and needs, remains the same. I enjoyed her later years as much as I did the war years. She was funny, brave and inspiring. What a joy this book was to read.
June 9, 2020
I cannot imagine why I trudged through this book, except that I started it about 6 mos ago and quit, and somehow got a wrongheaded idea that I couldn't let it beat me. I wish I had. I usually love other people's diaries, but not this one.
Pratt is not at all "notable." She's simply Simon Garfield's pet diarist for some reason, but she is no Nella Last. Nella Last was fascinated by life, by people, and wished she had been able to have an education. She pushed herself to vanquish a nervous breakdown, physical disability, and an unhappy marriage to make a happy home for her sons and their friends, later striving to contribute in any way she could to the comfort of the soldiers during WW2. Nella also had a very real struggle to make ends meet, while Pratt moans about being so short of money, and then splashes out on dinner at Simpson's in London, shopping in Harrod's, or Jaeger clothes. Pratt saw herself as an intellectual, as a writer, as a political person, and she was none of those things. What she was, is a dreamer, a dilettante. She dabbled first with architectural studies (there is no record here that she actually finished a degree in anything, having changed her syllabus and emphasis at least twice), then with Communism, Theosophy, "auragraphics" and spiritualism, etc. Most of her "affaires du coeur" only take place in her head, though she does have a penchant for married Jacks the Lad whose only interest is getting her into bed. Over the years she has several friends with benefits, at a time when this was not the accepted thing. Aboard ship bound for Jamaica, she encourages various male passengers to slobber all over her, blasts them with scorn in her diary, and then writes to her family what "glorious fun" it all was; what a hypocrite. Again, she rips apart fellow passengers on a voyage to Malta in her diary and then: "What I detest about life aboard ship is its close, gossipy, uncharitable atmosphere." Look in the mirror, dear. This judgemental superiority does not wane with the years; a "dear friend" invites her for a much-needed holiday (paying her expenses of course) only to be referred to later as "that appalling woman."
Garfield admits that he edited out much of her early travels in order to emphasise (his word) the war years (his favourite hobby horse), yet she does very little actual work during the war. Not for her Nella's desire to "save and serve" or even make do and mend. Yes, she works for an aluminium factory, but "work" and the war effort are apparently not very high on her personal agenda; she speaks repeatedly of not doing very much at all. Later, after letting her Communist sympathies or whatever they were slide, she refers to a couple of paying guests as "proletariat" because they have actual jobs (at a garden centre, my deah!) as opposed to her lovely self, with a private income which during the war years was higher than many working class men with families were paid.
What enraged me was her "love" of cats, which included a lack of care that amounts to cruelty. Flea powder and wormer were both freely available, so why does she blithely refer to her cat and its kittens being "covered" with fleas without doing anything about it, and another cat as "full of worms" without treating it? She also "can't bear" to give her "beloved" cats the gift of peace when they are obviously dying in pain. In the case of her cat Dinah, she remarks "She smells, oh how she smells" and even admits that euthanasia would be the kindest course, but she "can't bear it." Where I live, this is cruelty. She also aspires to be a backyard breeder; fortunately most of this, like her romantic attachments, takes place in her head, though she allows her females to breed at will, in spite of knowing she should have them spayed.
Instead of having a real job, for many years Pratt lived on private income and worked on three or four books, only one of which was published to tepid acclaim and passed quickly into remaindered sale. She had no concept of the writer's struggle even in those days; no literary agent (who would have to be paid)--instead she seemed to think that the publishers should receive her books with cries of joy and gratitude for the privilege offered them of publishing her stuff. Rejection slips fall like rain through her letter box, of course, and each is taken as a personal insult, though she has many London friends who are published writers and explain that this is reality. Reality? She wants no truck with it! This is the woman who goes to a medium to be cured of cataract and thyroid disease.
A star and a half, edging down to one star.
Pratt is not at all "notable." She's simply Simon Garfield's pet diarist for some reason, but she is no Nella Last. Nella Last was fascinated by life, by people, and wished she had been able to have an education. She pushed herself to vanquish a nervous breakdown, physical disability, and an unhappy marriage to make a happy home for her sons and their friends, later striving to contribute in any way she could to the comfort of the soldiers during WW2. Nella also had a very real struggle to make ends meet, while Pratt moans about being so short of money, and then splashes out on dinner at Simpson's in London, shopping in Harrod's, or Jaeger clothes. Pratt saw herself as an intellectual, as a writer, as a political person, and she was none of those things. What she was, is a dreamer, a dilettante. She dabbled first with architectural studies (there is no record here that she actually finished a degree in anything, having changed her syllabus and emphasis at least twice), then with Communism, Theosophy, "auragraphics" and spiritualism, etc. Most of her "affaires du coeur" only take place in her head, though she does have a penchant for married Jacks the Lad whose only interest is getting her into bed. Over the years she has several friends with benefits, at a time when this was not the accepted thing. Aboard ship bound for Jamaica, she encourages various male passengers to slobber all over her, blasts them with scorn in her diary, and then writes to her family what "glorious fun" it all was; what a hypocrite. Again, she rips apart fellow passengers on a voyage to Malta in her diary and then: "What I detest about life aboard ship is its close, gossipy, uncharitable atmosphere." Look in the mirror, dear. This judgemental superiority does not wane with the years; a "dear friend" invites her for a much-needed holiday (paying her expenses of course) only to be referred to later as "that appalling woman."
Garfield admits that he edited out much of her early travels in order to emphasise (his word) the war years (his favourite hobby horse), yet she does very little actual work during the war. Not for her Nella's desire to "save and serve" or even make do and mend. Yes, she works for an aluminium factory, but "work" and the war effort are apparently not very high on her personal agenda; she speaks repeatedly of not doing very much at all. Later, after letting her Communist sympathies or whatever they were slide, she refers to a couple of paying guests as "proletariat" because they have actual jobs (at a garden centre, my deah!) as opposed to her lovely self, with a private income which during the war years was higher than many working class men with families were paid.
What enraged me was her "love" of cats, which included a lack of care that amounts to cruelty. Flea powder and wormer were both freely available, so why does she blithely refer to her cat and its kittens being "covered" with fleas without doing anything about it, and another cat as "full of worms" without treating it? She also "can't bear" to give her "beloved" cats the gift of peace when they are obviously dying in pain. In the case of her cat Dinah, she remarks "She smells, oh how she smells" and even admits that euthanasia would be the kindest course, but she "can't bear it." Where I live, this is cruelty. She also aspires to be a backyard breeder; fortunately most of this, like her romantic attachments, takes place in her head, though she allows her females to breed at will, in spite of knowing she should have them spayed.
Instead of having a real job, for many years Pratt lived on private income and worked on three or four books, only one of which was published to tepid acclaim and passed quickly into remaindered sale. She had no concept of the writer's struggle even in those days; no literary agent (who would have to be paid)--instead she seemed to think that the publishers should receive her books with cries of joy and gratitude for the privilege offered them of publishing her stuff. Rejection slips fall like rain through her letter box, of course, and each is taken as a personal insult, though she has many London friends who are published writers and explain that this is reality. Reality? She wants no truck with it! This is the woman who goes to a medium to be cured of cataract and thyroid disease.
A star and a half, edging down to one star.
September 1, 2018
I picked up this book for my groups reading challenge, recommended to me by Emer. I was pretty certain I wasn't going to like this, since I'm not a fan of non-fiction, particularly not biographies or something of the sort. So knowing this book was going to be following one woman throughout her whole life via journal entries I was like oh god, I'm going to be bored to tears. . .
I wasn't. I was at times, and that's weird to say about someone's life, but it was because of how mundane it was. Yet, it was extraordinary. To see a world through the eyes of someone that had lived then, lived that every day, without hindsight, without that bias of knowledge, was amazing. It's one thing to know all the facts about the time before the war, the war, and then the time after - could name you pretty much every Prime Minister in order, talk about the devaluation of the pound, the different war treaties etc - but to see it from such an everyday, authentic, perspective was powerful. It's hard to find the words to describe it.
Jean is also relatable af. So many times I sat there nodding along, understanding the way she felt and her hopes, dreams and fears - and I think for diaries that pre-date me, but allow me to still connect, are transcending. Jean did have a way with words, I feel. While listing her normal every day to day, she still made it captivating.
It's not easy to sit here and write a 'review', because this isn't just a piece of text. This was her life, and I don't really feel like I can sit here and judge. I'm just amazed by her upkeep of her journal entries and the life she lived.
(Also I die, pretty much every other journal entry was about how horny she was. Jean - if only you had access to hot hockey player NAs).
So just finished typing this review and was gonna hit publish but I feel like there's more to say but I don't know how to say it . . . it was just extraordinary to follow this woman along on her life, through the ups and the downs, and I didn't realise how deeply attached I got to Jean until I read the words (this was her last diary entry) . . . just wow.
Just a couple of my favourite quotations:
'And I am left wandering - is it all a pageant to please immortal eyes?'
'But give me words, not bricks, to play with and I will build you palaces with Kings.'
'It hurts. I am like a plant trying to find some suitable corner in which to grow and having to uproot myself perpetually.'
'The cottage has been shaken by explosions. Shrapnel has fallen over the village. Life goes n. This is what amazes and thrills me.'
'At work Lizzie de Groote expressed frustration that she had lived nearly a quarter of a century and what had she done? I should have said to her that it is not what one does, but what one is in the process of becoming that matters.'
''My last chance would be gone to send some loathsome murderer to his end.' Precisely what distunguises the RAF fighters and bombers as heroes and the Luftwaffe as 'loathsome murderers'? If that's our service mentality, Lord help our post war world.'
'So go on, if you can, from here. Do not prophesy, dream or hope. Just work.'
I wasn't. I was at times, and that's weird to say about someone's life, but it was because of how mundane it was. Yet, it was extraordinary. To see a world through the eyes of someone that had lived then, lived that every day, without hindsight, without that bias of knowledge, was amazing. It's one thing to know all the facts about the time before the war, the war, and then the time after - could name you pretty much every Prime Minister in order, talk about the devaluation of the pound, the different war treaties etc - but to see it from such an everyday, authentic, perspective was powerful. It's hard to find the words to describe it.
Jean is also relatable af. So many times I sat there nodding along, understanding the way she felt and her hopes, dreams and fears - and I think for diaries that pre-date me, but allow me to still connect, are transcending. Jean did have a way with words, I feel. While listing her normal every day to day, she still made it captivating.
It's not easy to sit here and write a 'review', because this isn't just a piece of text. This was her life, and I don't really feel like I can sit here and judge. I'm just amazed by her upkeep of her journal entries and the life she lived.
(Also I die, pretty much every other journal entry was about how horny she was. Jean - if only you had access to hot hockey player NAs).
So just finished typing this review and was gonna hit publish but I feel like there's more to say but I don't know how to say it . . . it was just extraordinary to follow this woman along on her life, through the ups and the downs, and I didn't realise how deeply attached I got to Jean until I read the words (this was her last diary entry) . . . just wow.
Just a couple of my favourite quotations:
'And I am left wandering - is it all a pageant to please immortal eyes?'
'But give me words, not bricks, to play with and I will build you palaces with Kings.'
'It hurts. I am like a plant trying to find some suitable corner in which to grow and having to uproot myself perpetually.'
'The cottage has been shaken by explosions. Shrapnel has fallen over the village. Life goes n. This is what amazes and thrills me.'
'At work Lizzie de Groote expressed frustration that she had lived nearly a quarter of a century and what had she done? I should have said to her that it is not what one does, but what one is in the process of becoming that matters.'
''My last chance would be gone to send some loathsome murderer to his end.' Precisely what distunguises the RAF fighters and bombers as heroes and the Luftwaffe as 'loathsome murderers'? If that's our service mentality, Lord help our post war world.'
'So go on, if you can, from here. Do not prophesy, dream or hope. Just work.'
October 9, 2017
Book coincidences. Picked up simon garfield's 'our hidden lives' - edited Mass Observation diary entries from the '40s - in my neighbourhood 'charity shop' / bookdrop site and was fascinated and riveted . Included extracts from 5 M.O. contributors including ''Maggie Joy Blunt' - easily the best writer. Didn't take it with me on a recent work trip to Arran but was missing it. Woke up early in holiday cottage and looked for something to read and picked up 'a notable woman - the romantic journals of Jean Lucey Pratt' - edited by Simon Garfield - turns out to be the real life diaries of 'Maggie Joy Blunt'. A heavy book, 700 pages, but so compelling that I bought one on amazon when I got home and had to bring it with me on this Poland train trip despite the weight. Coming to the end of it now, with that same feeling that I had after finishing Proust - sadness - bereftness - that I'll be leaving her behind. Fabulous diaries, fabulous editing job. Thank you Simon Garfield. And thank you Jean Lucey Pratt.several second hand on amazon - you won't be disappointed . There's a beautiful review on here by Emer with extracts.
January 13, 2017
I'm reminded sharply of a poignant vignette from An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines:
Jean Pratt was part of this generation, one of the woman who came of age after WWI amid a scarcity of eligible bachelors, and was thus doomed to become the easily adopted and discarded mistress of the few inadequate available men during the following conflict. While she was never as woebegotten or underprivileged as the subject of the paragraph above, reading her desperate longings for a stable family home recorded in her journal reminds you of the lifelong penalty paid by these women for the brutishly foreshortened lives of their male peers.
The other theme of this deftly edited collection is her enduring attempts to make her way in the world mainly on her own resources. So Jean finds a little useful work during the war, but it soon comes to an end afterwards, and thereafter makes a concerted go at becoming a published author, to some but limited success, before settling for proprietorship of a village bookshop. Her first and, until now, only book is published in 1952, a biography of an 18th Century actress that, likely because of its niche subject, is soon remaindered. A couple of follow-ups are rejected and, despite her repeated declamations to her diary that she will remain true to her intentions, by the following decade she has abandoned the effort to focus on eking out a subsistence from her small business (a situation doubtless familiar to anyone who has ever harboured creative ambitions while holding down a day job to pay the bills). By the seventies, after coping with a late bout of depression, she has retrenched a little and, with the aid of some fortunate monetary gifts and small investments, is able to maintain the shop in more modest premises and achieve a comfortable standard of living until semi-retirement in 1980. A scant dozen remaining pages of entries mainly recording prosaic day-to-day matters sees her through to illness - cancer - until passing away in a nursing home in 1986. Although her contentment with her circumscribed lot is plain, and the struggles and inner torments present throughout the greater part of her life have long ceased, it feels a melancholy end (albeit not one of the worst), probably little different to a twilight that many of us are likely to experience. Is Jean therefore to be judged a failure by the standards of her earlier ambitions and desires? ("'You will never be happy - you want too much.' I see this now as meaning that I want more than I am capable of achieving.") The beauty of her diaries lies in proving not, that the smaller victories and overcome vicissitudes may amount to a credible legacy even if its main impact is limited to ones immediate acquaintances and neighbours, and that "you will never meet an ordinary person" for "the destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its 'stars'". Indeed, the existence of her diaries in this published form is a posthumous repudiation of any 'failure' on her part as an author - ultimately, they mark her time on this earth more effectively than any gravestone or memorial, and if there is sorrow that she was not to know this, there are at least hints that she was open to the possibility.
This is not a story with intense moments of drama, a wide sweep of events or marked changes in fortune, and it peters out quietly rather than coming to a definitively forthright conclusion. It will fascinate those seeking insight into the daily lives of ordinary people, or at least one representative individual, at home in Britain before, during and after the Second World War, but its coverage of background events is limited and even arguably beside the point. On a personal level, I would award it three-and-a-half stars for these reasons as they stand to satisfy me, but as a historical document and editorial achievement by Simon Garfield, it most probably deserves more.
There were widows and spinsters so lonely that they could fill their teapots with tears. In 1958 the novelist John Braine described eating poached eggs on toast in a London tea shop. The middle-aged woman next to him, 'pale and drab in a skimpy cotton dress clinging to her scraggy body', wore no wedding ring. When she was young, he thought, 'some British general, breathing heavily, would have at last worked out the meaning of attrition and would have issued the order which deposited her future husband screaming on the barbed wire or drowning in the mud, and which left her, forty years later, eating a roll and butter and drinking a glass of orangeade, with dreadful slowness, alone in a London tea shop'.
Jean Pratt was part of this generation, one of the woman who came of age after WWI amid a scarcity of eligible bachelors, and was thus doomed to become the easily adopted and discarded mistress of the few inadequate available men during the following conflict. While she was never as woebegotten or underprivileged as the subject of the paragraph above, reading her desperate longings for a stable family home recorded in her journal reminds you of the lifelong penalty paid by these women for the brutishly foreshortened lives of their male peers.
The other theme of this deftly edited collection is her enduring attempts to make her way in the world mainly on her own resources. So Jean finds a little useful work during the war, but it soon comes to an end afterwards, and thereafter makes a concerted go at becoming a published author, to some but limited success, before settling for proprietorship of a village bookshop. Her first and, until now, only book is published in 1952, a biography of an 18th Century actress that, likely because of its niche subject, is soon remaindered. A couple of follow-ups are rejected and, despite her repeated declamations to her diary that she will remain true to her intentions, by the following decade she has abandoned the effort to focus on eking out a subsistence from her small business (a situation doubtless familiar to anyone who has ever harboured creative ambitions while holding down a day job to pay the bills). By the seventies, after coping with a late bout of depression, she has retrenched a little and, with the aid of some fortunate monetary gifts and small investments, is able to maintain the shop in more modest premises and achieve a comfortable standard of living until semi-retirement in 1980. A scant dozen remaining pages of entries mainly recording prosaic day-to-day matters sees her through to illness - cancer - until passing away in a nursing home in 1986. Although her contentment with her circumscribed lot is plain, and the struggles and inner torments present throughout the greater part of her life have long ceased, it feels a melancholy end (albeit not one of the worst), probably little different to a twilight that many of us are likely to experience. Is Jean therefore to be judged a failure by the standards of her earlier ambitions and desires? ("'You will never be happy - you want too much.' I see this now as meaning that I want more than I am capable of achieving.") The beauty of her diaries lies in proving not, that the smaller victories and overcome vicissitudes may amount to a credible legacy even if its main impact is limited to ones immediate acquaintances and neighbours, and that "you will never meet an ordinary person" for "the destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its 'stars'". Indeed, the existence of her diaries in this published form is a posthumous repudiation of any 'failure' on her part as an author - ultimately, they mark her time on this earth more effectively than any gravestone or memorial, and if there is sorrow that she was not to know this, there are at least hints that she was open to the possibility.
This is not a story with intense moments of drama, a wide sweep of events or marked changes in fortune, and it peters out quietly rather than coming to a definitively forthright conclusion. It will fascinate those seeking insight into the daily lives of ordinary people, or at least one representative individual, at home in Britain before, during and after the Second World War, but its coverage of background events is limited and even arguably beside the point. On a personal level, I would award it three-and-a-half stars for these reasons as they stand to satisfy me, but as a historical document and editorial achievement by Simon Garfield, it most probably deserves more.
December 16, 2015
How much changes, how much stays the same. I enjoyed this book and found it affecting on a number of levels - sad, troubling, warm, intelligent, funny as well as being unusually revelatory on a social level. Diaries often serve as outlets for extremes of emotion so some of Jean's highs and lows can be tempered, but certain themes prevail. I loved her candour - perhaps possible because private, in spite of her frequent worries that no one would read her documented thoughts and daily doings. There is also a commonality implicit in these diaries that is often missed - I think Jean, who commented so often on being lonely, would like to know that she is, at least and still, not alone.
Some quotes:
"I am deciding to make a bold mad plunge into a river I don't know. Nothing is going to shake me or make me change my mind anymore. But give me words, not bricks, to play with and I will build you palaces for kings. Difficulties? Millions of them! Failure? Inevitable."
"I have been troubled by the effort involved in living. Why, if I like being lazy, staying in bed, reading easy literature, going to a film or play, drifting around from friend to friend and adventure to adventure - why should I not live like that? I have the economic means, I do not have to support anyone but myself. Why should I bother to write a book? Why must I always be making the effort to improve, to progress?"
"....an American who was so horrified when he read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading."
Some quotes:
"I am deciding to make a bold mad plunge into a river I don't know. Nothing is going to shake me or make me change my mind anymore. But give me words, not bricks, to play with and I will build you palaces for kings. Difficulties? Millions of them! Failure? Inevitable."
"I have been troubled by the effort involved in living. Why, if I like being lazy, staying in bed, reading easy literature, going to a film or play, drifting around from friend to friend and adventure to adventure - why should I not live like that? I have the economic means, I do not have to support anyone but myself. Why should I bother to write a book? Why must I always be making the effort to improve, to progress?"
"....an American who was so horrified when he read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading."
February 9, 2017
I received a free copy of this book from a Goodreads giveaway.
An absorbing account of one woman's life. Jean Pratt's diaries span the period from 1925 (when she was 15) to a few weeks before her death in 1986. Judiciously edited by Simon Garfield, they describe her romantic hopes and disappointments, her struggle to decide upon a career, financial worries, family relationships and friendships.
This book is full of surprises. Sometimes Jean can appear as a likeable eccentric, surrounded by cats in her cottage. However, she is also quite witty and acerbic, and very open about her faults. She is very honest about sex and her relationships, totally shattering the stereotype of the prim and proper 'maiden lady'.
There are some fascinating insights into life during and after World War II. I was particularly struck by Jean's attempts to stop smoking in the 1950s, using a kind of cigarette substitute with a minty vapour - a forerunner of the e-cigarette. However, the real joy of this book is getting to know Jean as her life unfolds. I wanted her to find love, to be successful as a writer, to stop being so hard on herself. It was a shame that she wrote much less in the later years of her life, as it disturbed the overall balance a bit, but overall this was a really captivating book.
An absorbing account of one woman's life. Jean Pratt's diaries span the period from 1925 (when she was 15) to a few weeks before her death in 1986. Judiciously edited by Simon Garfield, they describe her romantic hopes and disappointments, her struggle to decide upon a career, financial worries, family relationships and friendships.
This book is full of surprises. Sometimes Jean can appear as a likeable eccentric, surrounded by cats in her cottage. However, she is also quite witty and acerbic, and very open about her faults. She is very honest about sex and her relationships, totally shattering the stereotype of the prim and proper 'maiden lady'.
There are some fascinating insights into life during and after World War II. I was particularly struck by Jean's attempts to stop smoking in the 1950s, using a kind of cigarette substitute with a minty vapour - a forerunner of the e-cigarette. However, the real joy of this book is getting to know Jean as her life unfolds. I wanted her to find love, to be successful as a writer, to stop being so hard on herself. It was a shame that she wrote much less in the later years of her life, as it disturbed the overall balance a bit, but overall this was a really captivating book.
June 12, 2020
2020 bk 197: I have met Jean Lucey Pratt through three other collections of Mass Observations Dairies. In those Simon Garfield and others gave her a pseudonym of Maggie Joy Blunt to protect her identity (she was still living at the time). Jean Pratt was a single woman in England in a time where there were far more women than men as a result of two wars. The first third of the diary collections bemoan the fact that she is not married, it is only as she reaches her late 50's and 60's that she realizes that her life of independence is far more important to her. Whether one agrees with her philosophies of life (she was interested in spiritualism, maharishis, anything other than the traditional), she was committed to her diaries for most of her life. Through them we are able to see the growth of a woman from age 15 to 10 weeks before her death. She writes in detail of the people she interacts with, includes local political commentary, and loves her cats. A good look at middle class life from the 1920's through the 1970's.
March 26, 2016
Absolutely wonderful!
A gripping page-turner of an ordinary life much lived despite periods of aching loneliness and persistent worries about money, all the way into early old age. She began her diaries in 1925 and made her final entry in 1986. It was a privilege to bear witness to her every mood, from buying clothes to getting a publishing deal, from caring for her army of cats to falling for the "wrong" sort of man - one after the other.
Jean Lucey Pratt was very English, very independent, very brave and very funny!
I've only just finished it, shed a few tears, and would like to start it all over again, to bring her back to life once more ... because I've no idea how I'm going to get through the rest of the weekend without her.
A gripping page-turner of an ordinary life much lived despite periods of aching loneliness and persistent worries about money, all the way into early old age. She began her diaries in 1925 and made her final entry in 1986. It was a privilege to bear witness to her every mood, from buying clothes to getting a publishing deal, from caring for her army of cats to falling for the "wrong" sort of man - one after the other.
Jean Lucey Pratt was very English, very independent, very brave and very funny!
I've only just finished it, shed a few tears, and would like to start it all over again, to bring her back to life once more ... because I've no idea how I'm going to get through the rest of the weekend without her.
February 6, 2017
I truly enjoyed reading this book. I gave it 5 stars because I am just so grateful that it exists, compiled into a book, not in a drawer or a box in a loft or in a bin.
It is very powerful, atmospheric, funny, humdrum, reflective, reflexive. Jean was never a great writer, or was she? Did her choice of subject matter mean that se never got the chance to take off in the literary world? You feel that you can et inside this shy, horny, confused, self judging, depressed, eccentric woman and be totally rooting for her,. The war years are fascinating and the last years are sublime and moving. Thanks to Jean Lucey and Simon Garfield for the painstaking life's work. I recommend those with an interest in social history, lost love, London, the arts and cats to delve in and lose youselves!
It is very powerful, atmospheric, funny, humdrum, reflective, reflexive. Jean was never a great writer, or was she? Did her choice of subject matter mean that se never got the chance to take off in the literary world? You feel that you can et inside this shy, horny, confused, self judging, depressed, eccentric woman and be totally rooting for her,. The war years are fascinating and the last years are sublime and moving. Thanks to Jean Lucey and Simon Garfield for the painstaking life's work. I recommend those with an interest in social history, lost love, London, the arts and cats to delve in and lose youselves!
February 12, 2017
I slowed down noticeably as I neared the close of this lovely book; not wanting it to end. These journals reveal a warm, witty and intelligent woman who was eventually to feel content with her own company but nonetheless suffered bouts of loneliness and uncertainty across the years. Her diaries are an important social history in their own right - Jean records life as it was, for her, with the main events of the day and opinions of herself and her peers noted for posterity.
An ordinary woman with aspirations and dreams like any other person that I defy other readers not to identify with. I'm torn between wanting to pass this rather special book on to share with friends and keeping it on the bookcase to revisit at will. Thoroughly recommend this one.
An ordinary woman with aspirations and dreams like any other person that I defy other readers not to identify with. I'm torn between wanting to pass this rather special book on to share with friends and keeping it on the bookcase to revisit at will. Thoroughly recommend this one.
Read
April 9, 2017Tbh, it could have been a lot shorter; I nearly gave up several times. I got frustrated with the repetiveness of entries and the endless love affairs which aren't. I was surprised by the honesty of personal and female issues for the time and how little she and her life were affected by the war. I actually preferred the latter entries which weren't as regular but said more. Whatever my view of the content, it's still an amazing collection of a lifeyime's diary entries. That's the nub of it: it's real life, which can be repetitive and boring with no real drama or end result, just lots of insignificant events.
June 28, 2020
This was an absolute brick of a book - almost daunting to begin and heavy to hold (wish I’d read it on a kindle really). But I loved it. Jean Lucey Pratt was born in 1909 and began her diaries in 1925 - she continued them until 10 weeks before she died, in 1986. It was an emotional journey, accompanying her through her young hopes and her adult triumphs and disappointments. In the background, the world changes. There’s a war, the NHS is founded, there are strikes and the 3-day week...it’s all there, a stage to her life’s drama.
She writes beautifully, and she often mentions hoping that her diaries will be published. I’m glad that they were.
She writes beautifully, and she often mentions hoping that her diaries will be published. I’m glad that they were.
February 10, 2019
‘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...
For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2019/02/10/a...
June 2, 2017
I first met Jean Pratt along with some of her contemporaries in Simon Garfield's wonderful series of WWII journals out of the Mass Observation project. She was an expressive and intelligent contributor to that project, so I naturally turned to this collection of her journals to spend more time with her.
Well, perhaps more is somewhat less. All of us-- if we wrote our day-to-day experiences as honestly as Jean did in her personal journals-- would spend a fair amount of time being less than our best and struggling with the same Big Questions over and over again. It's humbling to realize this while reading these 700 pages-- but sometimes our Big Questions and our struggles to resolve them are really rather small and repetitive. That may be the lesson that "A Notable Woman" teaches most effectively.
I felt an affection for and a sort of loyalty to Jean because Garfield's other books, so I stayed with this one in spite of long stretches of not-a-lot-happening and (as others have commented) occasions of wanting to give Jean a good shaking because of her romantic choices. (Oh Jean, you KNOW that man is a rotter; you said so yourself! PLEASE don't sleep with him again!) At the book's conclusion, I was glad that I had stayed faithful to it. It was a real, ordinary life, told with honesty and emotion, even when the emotion was all about the cats.
RIP, Jean Lucey Pratt.
Well, perhaps more is somewhat less. All of us-- if we wrote our day-to-day experiences as honestly as Jean did in her personal journals-- would spend a fair amount of time being less than our best and struggling with the same Big Questions over and over again. It's humbling to realize this while reading these 700 pages-- but sometimes our Big Questions and our struggles to resolve them are really rather small and repetitive. That may be the lesson that "A Notable Woman" teaches most effectively.
I felt an affection for and a sort of loyalty to Jean because Garfield's other books, so I stayed with this one in spite of long stretches of not-a-lot-happening and (as others have commented) occasions of wanting to give Jean a good shaking because of her romantic choices. (Oh Jean, you KNOW that man is a rotter; you said so yourself! PLEASE don't sleep with him again!) At the book's conclusion, I was glad that I had stayed faithful to it. It was a real, ordinary life, told with honesty and emotion, even when the emotion was all about the cats.
RIP, Jean Lucey Pratt.
May 10, 2016
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. I was given this ARC by the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
May 20, 2021
I give credit to Simon Garfield who read through all of her journals and edited them down to this book. I don’t know if I could have struggled through the actual journals. I slogged through parts of this. Interesting at first, after a time it is depressing because she is depressed. There are only so many entries you can stand to read where she laments her failure to marry, make anything of herself, succeed at anything really - before you start skimming. A self-described quiet, shy introvert, she suffered from a lack of confidence as well as the misfortune to hit womanhood at a time (post WWI) when women far outnumbered men in England. Yet she had a pretty adventurous life in her early days and tried her hand at several different careers with varying success. Many times she was her own worst enemy. Yet her diary reveals moments of artistry in expression and a true appreciation for beauty in her surroundings.
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September 21, 2016The collected diaries of an ordinary Englishwoman. She started the diary in 1926 when she was 16 and ended it in 1986 a few weeks before her death. Over 700 pages. She received training in architecture but her true love was writing. She pined for male companionship until her early 40s and though she had boyfriends/lovers never found the relationship she desired. She worked as a journalist, did work for an architectural journal, had a biography published, and settled into a life as the owner of a bookstore where she was constantly worried about money. A great cat lover she knew as much as anyone about books on cats finishing her bookseller career managing a mail-order business in cat books. Fascinating life of a private person.
June 22, 2016
The diaries of Jean Lucey Pratt reads like a novel in itself. Jean wrote about anything that amused, inspired or troubled her, laying bare her life with aching honesty, infectious humour, indelicate gossip and heartrending hopefulness. She documented the loss of a tennis match, her unpredictable driving, catty friends, devoted cats and difficult guests. When you read the pages, you realise that you become part of her inner circle of friends, imagining her in her bookshop or at her cottage with her cats. It gives a great overview of human emotions in a lifetime. Recognizable today but undoubtedly also about a hundred years.
This is a gem of a book and great joy to read it.
This is a gem of a book and great joy to read it.
September 20, 2023
Unusual look into a private life
I appreciated the intimate revelations provided by this author over such a very long period of time. I felt so often that she could have been me or my sister in spite of the historical and geographical differences.
Her concerns as a nineteen year old and then as a sixty year old show clearly how we all mature in our thinking and dilemmas. What bothered her as a young woman seemed of no concern later. I can agree!
There were times it was almost boring, but not quite! I enjoyed following her true story.
I appreciated the intimate revelations provided by this author over such a very long period of time. I felt so often that she could have been me or my sister in spite of the historical and geographical differences.
Her concerns as a nineteen year old and then as a sixty year old show clearly how we all mature in our thinking and dilemmas. What bothered her as a young woman seemed of no concern later. I can agree!
There were times it was almost boring, but not quite! I enjoyed following her true story.
February 13, 2021
I loved this, and I feel quite bereft, having finished it.
I think the title is excellent, but the sub title is misleading. These aren't romantic journals, they are the diaries of a woman between 1925, when she was only15, to when she died in 1986.
In that sixty year period, there is some romance but more than that, there's a wealth of detail about the life of a single woman, her interests and irritations.
Loved it.
I think the title is excellent, but the sub title is misleading. These aren't romantic journals, they are the diaries of a woman between 1925, when she was only15, to when she died in 1986.
In that sixty year period, there is some romance but more than that, there's a wealth of detail about the life of a single woman, her interests and irritations.
Loved it.
July 25, 2022
Great historical and literary diary.
It took me a little while to get into the personal nature of the journal, although historical events were included. By the midway point of the book I couldn't put it down. I am also an aging single cat lady, striving to live my life on my own terms. This is a very enjoyable book about a women who didn't always get what she wanted. With humor and candor she describes her warrior approach to living life honestly and fearlessly.
It took me a little while to get into the personal nature of the journal, although historical events were included. By the midway point of the book I couldn't put it down. I am also an aging single cat lady, striving to live my life on my own terms. This is a very enjoyable book about a women who didn't always get what she wanted. With humor and candor she describes her warrior approach to living life honestly and fearlessly.
November 22, 2022
While the world is falling apart, it was strangely comforting to calmly sit with Jean who, although her world was also falling apart, just went her quiet way. It was like meeting up with a friend over a cup of tea. Intelligent, open-minded, literate, classy and very British, Jean is to be admired. Simon Garfield made a wonderful job of collating her diaries. Definitely recommended for those who love a life-affirming read.
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