The Foolish Virgin

The Foolish Virgin is a biographical sequel to Manchester Fourteen Miles.

Margaret Penn (Author)

9780521282970, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 5 March 1981

256 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.55 kg

The Foolish Virgin is a biographical sequel to Manchester Fourteen Miles, in which Margaret Penn describes her childhood in a Lancashire labourer's family at the turn of the century. The sequel begins where the earlier book leaves off with Hilda Winstanley (alias Margaret Penn) arriving in London to live with her real father's family. It is a moving and humorous account of a young girl's reaction to being taken from a highly traditional rural working-class family and plunged into the sophisticated and active life of a middle-class professional family. By the end of the book Hilda Winstanley is a complete member of a higher class; literate, cultured, politically aware as a liberal and suffragist and prepared to earn her living as a secretary. The three volumes were popular with reviewers and readers in the late 1940s but then fell out of print. They now hold new appeal, as an important record of a fascinating period of social history, as well as a moving and evocative account of one woman's life. Cambridge University Press is delighted to make them available for a new generation to enjoy.

1. The nation of London
2. Sunday: new style
3. Aunt Helen and Aunt Mildred
4. The first battle
5. The Flowre of cities all
6. Springtime
7. Processes of education
8. Hilda alone
9. Mr Rumsey's establishment
10. Mr Ram Lal
11. The cause
12. Earning once more
13. Return to Moss Ferry
14. Old aquaintance
15. Onslaught of the hosts of Midian
16. A young girl out in the world
17. Encounter with a real author
18. The year 1914
19. The plains of heaven
20. Paradise deferred.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]