Sofka Zinovieff

A woman who wears her homes like garments

A review of My Life in Houses, by Margaret Forster. It’s a book that feels like it’s being told over a cup of tea

English novelist Margaret Forster, 1964 Photo: Getty 
issue 18 October 2014

Depending on your approach, home is where your heart is, where you hang your hat, or possibly where you hang yourself. Our homes reflect our characters, social milieux and finances, but we also reflect them. Leonard Woolf wrote that a house ‘has an immense influence on its inhabitants’, and contended that Monk’s House (where he lived with Virginia Woolf from 1919–1941) was ‘the most powerful moulder’ of how they had lived their lives.

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