A story that captures the changing sexual mores of the 1960s, Georgy Girl contrasts the choices two roommates make as birth control expands the range of options women have in their personal lives.
Georgina Parkin is the daughter of Ted and Doris Parkin, the valet and housekeeper of wealthy James Leamington; she has only recently moved out of her family’s quarters in the Leamington home, where she received the benefits of wealth such as education and clothing that the childless Leamingtons were pleased to bestow on her. She feels liberated because James Leamington’s smarmy attentions had begun to bother her, while her toadying father could see nothing wrong with his adored employer.
When Georgina finds a flat and advertises for a roommate, her life becomes more complicated: Meredith, her new roommate, plays the violin in the symphony and keeps company with a string of boyfriends, most of whom are musicians. While Meredith is beautiful and aware of the power that her beauty gives her over men, Georgy is a gangly ugly duckling, uncomfortable with her body and with the new freedoms single women are pursuing. She longs for love, and yet she fears it as well, enjoying her independence while remaining aware that she wants more in her life. She doesn’t want the attentions she attracts—James Leamington soon propositions her—and she can’t attract the attentions she wants.
When Meredith becomes pregnant by Jos, her current boyfriend, Georgy and Jos are the only ones pleased with the news, and they prevent Meredith from resorting to abortion, as she had done in the past. Meredith’s indifference to her newborn is incomprehensible to Georgy, who soon finds herself making choices that seemed impossible when she first moved out on her own.
In Georgy, Margaret Forster creates a predecessor to the kind of heroine one finds in a contemporary novel like Bridget Jones’s Diary: an independent young woman in charge of her own life and ready to enjoy her physical and emotional freedoms, but one who discovers how powerful are the attractions of such traditional roles as wife and mother. Forster’s third-person omniscient narrator gradually makes Meredith and the single life of sexual freedom seem monstrous; consequently, when Georgy decides on a surprising course of action, readers can perceive her choice to be a heroic and modern one when in fact it is actually highly traditional.
Forster examines modern sexual permissiveness and rejects it, giving her protagonist a nearly classic resolution to her story. Proponents of feminism are likely to be disappointed by the ending of Georgy Girl, but the novel provides a down-to-earth view of an era that has been mythologized for its excesses.
Bibliography
Kael, Pauline. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968.
Thompson, Howard. “Cinderella in London.” Review of Georgy Girl (film). New York Times, 22 September 1996, 62.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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