research query, especially for the Brits here

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I know that properly doing this would require reading more than one book, but I’m trying not to fall down the research well, here.

If I were to read only one book to get a sense of the life a pretty and popular young woman (age circa 18-21) would have lived in late 1940s post-war London, what book should that be?

For my purposes, fiction would likely suffice as well as nonfiction. I’m looking for a sense of culture and society here, rather than specific facts.

0 Responses to “research query, especially for the Brits here”

  1. tchernabyelo

    I’m not sure, but what I will say is that her social class will make an ENORMOUS difference.

  2. doriscrockford2

    Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Love Lessons by Joan Wyndham is a diary of a “pretty and popular young woman” living in London in the first years of the war. She was an art student at the time and the book is full of parties. I just checked her wiki page, and apparently she wrote another diary that might cover your period called Love is Blue, but I haven’t read that one.

    Another book which covers a variety of social classes after the war is Our Hidden Lives, edited by Simon Garfield. They are diaries of 5 people in the immediate post-war period, one of them being “Maggie Joy Blunt, a thoroughly modern young woman, bored out of her mind in a metal company in Slough.”

    HTH!

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