A Notable Woman

Virginia Woolf meets Caitlin Moran - the extraordinary journals chronicling one ordinary woman's life, edited and introduced by Simon Garfield

Perhaps in some future generation, when I am dead, they may read these words I am now writing. Reader please be kind to me! I am only 16 at present, and just realizing life and beginning to think for myself. It's all very thrilling in its strange newness.

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 For sixty years, no one had an inkling of her diaries' existence, and they have remained unpublished until now.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.