‘Joining the Dots: A Woman in her Time’ by Juliet Gardiner

The historian Juliet Gardiner, whose work I have always enjoyed, sadly died this summer at the age of eighty-five. Having read the newspaper obituaries and established what an interesting life she had led, I picked up this memoir to find out more.

It is quite short and is not a full autobiography by a long measure. Instead, Gardiner muses on various aspects of her life while interweaving her own experiences with the wider history of the ways in which women’s lives changed during her lifetime – changes which affected her in all kinds of ways, almost all of them positive.

Indeed, that is really the conceit of the book. Gardiner uses her own life as a thread through the extraordinary transformation in women’s lives that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. Changes in education, employment, marriage, divorce and expectations about women’s place in society are not simply historical developments she describes. They repeatedly altered the possibilities open to her. In that sense she is here both historian and historical evidence.

Juliet Gardiner was adopted by a middle-aged, lower-middle-class couple towards the end of the Second World War. She grew up in Hemel Hempstead and, while in no way treated badly by her adoptive family, increasingly found the respectable, conventional and rather constricted life they expected her to lead frustratingly limiting. So she ran away at the age of sixteen and wound up in Bristol, doing various jobs before meeting an older man called George Gardiner, who had an Oxford degree and was working in provincial journalism.

It was not a particularly happy marriage, and matters became more frustrating for Juliet when George entered politics and was elected Conservative MP for Reigate in 1974. He was to become a prominent figure on the Thatcherite right, while Juliet’s own political preferences lay elsewhere. She consequently found herself required to perform the traditional role of an MP’s wife – a part for which she had little enthusiasm and even less ideological sympathy. They had three children, eventually divorced, and she later remarried:

We sought help from a marriage counsellor who suggested that George had fallen in love with me because I had a rebellious streak which he found stimulating and believed was deficient in his own make-up. But by this time I was in my early thirties, and while a rebellious teenager might be enticing, I felt he needed to acknowledge the seriousness of my views as I edged towards middle age. Predictably I had been attracted to him as an older man with a wider view of the world and its mores, a stable rock on which to clamber in order to change my life as I had been desperate to do. This was all probably true, but did not address the issue of irresolvable political differences – not the outlook and values that were endemic in these discrepancies and which would become more pronounced and problematic as the children grew older.

Blessed with wit, drive and a good brain, Juliet Gardiner effectively constructed for herself the education that her upbringing had denied her. Hers was not a conventional route into academic life. By the time she emerged with first-class honours in history and embarked on doctoral research, she was already married, had children and had lived a considerable amount of life.

She went on to edit ‘History Today’ in the early 1980s, worked in publishing and eventually became a successful historian in her own right, writing a series of substantial books on British social history, particularly the interwar years and the Second World War. The best known are ‘Wartime: Britain 1939–1945’, ‘The Blitz’ and ‘The Thirties: An Intimate History’.

Juliet Gardiner became a particular kind of historian. She appeared to be interested less in high politics than in what significant historical changes actually felt like to the people living through them. Her books draw extensively on diaries, letters, memoirs and other records of everyday experience. Perhaps that explains the one frustration I had with this memoir. I would have loved to know considerably more about Juliet Gardiner the working historian - how she found her sources, how she organised such enormous quantities of material and how she went about turning individual lives into social history. She omits this, mentioning it only in passing.

The book ends in 2012 with the alarming diagnosis of an aggressive brain tumour. There is consequently a valedictory quality to its closing pages. Gardiner plainly had good reason to suppose that she might be approaching the end of her life. Reading it now produces the curious experience of knowing something its author could not, in that although the illness effectively brought her extraordinarily productive working life to a close, she would survive for another fourteen years.

I found this perceptive and interesting throughout, although it is not the comprehensive autobiography I might have wished for. There were numerous points at which I wanted her to stop, linger and tell me much more, particularly about her life as a working historian. What she has left us instead is an engaging account of one woman’s journey through a period in which the possibilities open to women were transformed almost beyond recognition. And Juliet Gardiner herself – adopted child in a rather constricted Hemel Hempstead household, runaway teenager, MP’s wife, mature student, editor, publisher and finally distinguished historian – makes a good case study example.