Margaret Forster (25 May 1938 – 8 February 2016) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian and critic, best known for the 1965 novel Georgy Girl, made into a successful film of the same name, which inspired a hit song by The Seekers.

Her father, Arthur Forster, was a mechanic or factory fitter, her mother, Lilian (née Hind), a housewife who had worked as a clerk or secretary before her marriage.

[2] Forster's first published novel Dames' Delight, loosely based on her experiences at Oxford, launched her writing career in 1964.

[2] Her second, published the following year, was a bestseller: Georgy Girl describes the choices open to a young working-class woman in London in the Swinging Sixties.

It was adapted as a successful 1966 film starring Lynn Redgrave as Georgy, with Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates and James Mason,[1][2][5] for which Forster co-wrote the screenplay with Peter Nichols.

[1][2] Callil ascribes to Forster a world view "shaped by her sense of her working-class origins: most of her stories were about women's lives.

[3] In her biography of Barrett Browning, Forster draws on recently found letters and papers that shed light on the poet's life before she met and eloped with Robert Browning, replacing the myth of an invalid poet guarded by an ogre-like father with a more nuanced picture of an active, difficult woman, complicit in her virtual imprisonment.

[2][3][13] Good Wives (2001) surveyed contemporary and historical women married to famous men, including Mary Livingstone, Fanny Stevenson, Jennie Lee and herself.

[2][6] Her other historical writings include Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin (1997), an account of the Carr's biscuit factory in Carlisle.

[1][2][3] Hidden Lives, drawing on the life of her grandmother, a servant with a secret illegitimate daughter, was praised by the historian and critic Claire Tomalin as "a slice of history to be recalled whenever people lament the lovely world we have lost.

"[2] Frances Osborne cites it as her own inspiration for becoming a biographer: "It opened my eyes to how riveting the history of real girl-next-door women could be.

[3] Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin: A Family and Their Times 1831–1931 won the Lex Prize of The Global Business Book Award (1998).

[1][5] The British Library acquired the Margaret Forster Archive in March 2018, which consists of material relating to her works, professional and private correspondence, and personal papers.