In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote in her iconic early second-wave feminist text, The Feminine Mystique, that, when she was growing up in the 1930s, 'many mothers who loved their daughters - and mine was one - did not want their daughters to grow up like them... They knew we needed something more... But... they could not give us an image of what we could be'. One Girl Began, Kate Murray-Browne's second novel, wrestles with the same problem across more than a hundred years, as signalled by the ironic quote at the start from another book by a second-wave feminist activist, Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (1976): 'I too shall marry, have children, but not like her. I shall find a way of doing it all differently'. Friedan and Rich, in many ways, could not have been more different: Rich was famously a lesbian feminist who wrote about the significance of lesbianism for the women's movement and argued that 'compulsory heterosexuality' trapped all women, whereas Friedan felt that homosexuality was a distraction from what feminism was really about, and infamously called lesbians 'the lavender menace' in 1969, when she was president of the US National Organisation for Women. But when it came to adult womanhood and motherhood, they had some of the same problems: Rich married in her early twenties and had three sons, not coming out as a lesbian until after her husband's death.

Two of the three protagonists of One Girl Began face the same dilemma. Ellen is in her teens in 1909, forced to become a 'factory girl' after her father's death to support her mother and her young siblings. She is well aware of the physical toll of childbearing and the risk of domestic violence faced by wives, but, talking with her friend Mary, neither of them can see an alternative:

'"Aren't you scared?" Mary said... "Of what it's going to be like. After we leave the factory. Marry some bloke, endless babies, wash day every week... I don't want it." ...

"You don't have to get married," I said, although there was no woman I knew in the neighbourhood who wasn't.'

In 2019, Amanda, in her late thirties, has always wanted to become a mother, has put herself through several rounds of IVF to conceive, but is poleaxed by what it's actually like to have a new baby when her daughter Iris is born, and how the mother she has become is so different from the mother she thought she'd be: 'I had thought that messy or complicated feelings about being away from your child showed a lack of resolve, something you could refuse to let in'. She'd always planned to go back full-time to her journalist job after maternity leave, but after the Covid-19 pandemic hits and her plans are knocked off course, she finds herself wondering if she'll instead become one of those women she was determined not to emulate, who step back from their career after having a baby.

One Girl Began focuses on the communities women build together, whether that's through trade unions, squatting, communal living or activist camps like Greenham Common (it's not on screen but it gets a shout-out!), but despite this refreshing lens, it is in many ways a sad book. We really feel the characters' limited options, even in the present day, because of the way British society boxes in women who want to combine the meaningful work of a career with the meaningful work of motherhood. In the interstices of the narrative, we glimpse other women whose dreams were curtailed, such as the pair of middle-class women who come to work in a settlement house in the East End in 1909, and who possibly love each other, but are forced to go home to get married to men. Even the one wholly positive story about a working-class woman who manages to train to become a doctor in inter-war Britain feels almost like it's there as a taunt, an unachievable exception. But Murray-Browne's writing is as clear and beautiful as it was in her debut, The Upstairs Room, and this lifts what might otherwise be both familiar and grim material. She writes so well about motherhood that even somebody like me, who is tired of reading about babies, was totally engrossed.

I also loved the way Murray-Browne threads a map of key locations through and beyond Hackney, letting us see how the characters move through the same landscape without it ever feeling either difficult to follow or heavy-handed. Most obviously, all three women have ties to the same building: it's a box factory where Ellen works in 1909, a ruin where Frances squats in 1984, and a gentrified block of flats for Amanda in 2019. But I also adored how they all encounter other spaces: a house on Digby Street where Ellen moves in 1909 is identifiable by its fireplace tiles, 'purple curling petals on a pale-yellow background'; it's a squat in 1984, when Frances goes there to have a bath; Amanda's friend Lucy, an eco-conscious single-mother-by-choice, lives there with another new mother in 2019. The Black Hart pub is where Ellen gets a quart of gin, where Frances works behind the bar, and where Amanda attends a nursery rhyme group. The women all swim in Hampstead Heath Ladies' Ponds.

I was absolutely absorbed in much of this novel, but I do feel the 1984 sections fell a bit short. Frances's story feels tangential to the central themes of One Girl Began: she has no children but also seems to do little else with her life. Maybe this is Murray-Browne's point: that having no children doesn't mean that you automatically become some brilliant star, and that's OK. But it feels a little off in a novel that is otherwise so centrally about motherhood; it would have made more sense to me if Frances had either become a mother or made a deliberate choice to not have children, but instead it seems to be a lingering sadness for her, which skirts a bit too close to childless stereotypes for me (though don't worry: this is no Expectation). I also personally just found her a bit wet: almost any of the other women we meet in 1984 (Jane, Naomi, Susie, Violet) would have made a more interesting protagonist. It made me want a companion novel about women without children, whether they are childless-by-circumstance like Frances, are happily 'childfree', or, like me, have chosen not to have children not because they would never ever want them but because they don't want to bring up children under our current social order.

But that isn't this novel, and One Girl Began does great things in its own right: it's thoughtful, vivid and skilful, it made me really care about Ellen and Amanda, and it's so good on how we seize small moments of joy or opportunities for change. Highly, highly recommended, even if, like me, you are allergic to novels about early motherhood or multi-generational historical fiction.

This is a good book. I enjoyed certain parts of it more than others. The characters are well described but some parts of the book felt too long and caused me to lose interest.

This is the first novel I’ve read by the author and I was drawn to it by the synopsis. I love dual time frame novels, particularly those set at the turn of the twentieth century. The novel focuses on three women who are all connected by the same building. In 1909 the building is a factory where Ellen finds an escape at work from her family’s poverty, in 1984 Frances lives in the building which is now a squat and in 2020 new mother Amanda lives in the now gentrified flat at the start of the pandemic.
I loved the exploration of the building, how its use changed over a century and how the history of a building very much remains. It was an excellent way to explore and draw the reader into the lives of the three women who each had difficult challenges in their lives. I was completely immersed in the sections about Ellen in 1909 and found some of the other sections felt too long as I raced to get back to 1909. An interesting read that I enjoyed.
3.5 stars
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.

I enjoyed how these three different stories were woven together, however I struggled as a whole with the plot/timing of this book! Each character was interesting and well written, although some chapters felt like they dragged for a bit. Overall I did enjoy this book though, especially the historical elements and the focus on the main characters and their lives