The History of An English Family

Common People

Shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize 
 
'Part detective story, part Dickensian saga, part labour history. A thrilling and unnerving read' Observer 
 
'Mesmeric and deeply moving' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Remarkable, haunting, full of wisdom' The Times 
 
Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond. 
 
Epic in scope and deep in feeling, Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Original and eloquent, it is a timely rethinking of who the English were - but ultimately it reflects on history itself, and on our constant need to know who went before us and what we owe them.

In illuminating her own, Light serves up the most powerful family history I have ever read.

Light writes beautifully. With such colour and with perception and lyricism she clads the past....Common People is part memoir, part thrilling social history of the England of the Industrial Revolution, but above all a work of quiet poetry and insight into human behaviour. It is full of wisdom.

This book is a substantial achievement: its combination of scholarship and intelligence is, you may well think, the best monument you could have to all those she has rescued from time's oblivion.

Evocatively written...a thrilling and unnerving read

Exquisite...Barely a page goes by without something fascinating on it, betraying Light's skill in winkling out the most relevant or moving aspects of her antecedents' lives, which echo through the generations.

[A] short and beautifully written meditation on family and mobility.

Intellectually sound and relevant...a refreshingly modern way of thinking about our past.

Light [is skilled] in probing dark corners of her ancestry and exposing their historical meaning...packed with humanity.

Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, Alison Light makes her family speak for England.

Jerry White, author of London in the Eighteenth Century

A remarkable achievement...should become a classic.

Alison Light is a writer and critic. She is an honorary professor in the Department of English at University College, London, Honorary Professorial Fellow at Edinburgh University and a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, she is the author of the much-acclaimed Mrs Woolf and the Servants and Common People, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. She lives in Oxford.

Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond. 
 
Epic in scope and deep in feeling, Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Original and eloquent, it is a timely rethinking of who the English were - but ultimately it reflects on history itself, and on our constant need to know who went before us and what we owe them.

Mrs Woolf and the Servants

Creativity and those who make it possible - examined by one of today's most interesting and controversial British cultural historians

Fascinating, beautifully written and meticulously researched

An absorbing investigation, serious, radical and feminist in its politics, entertaining in its delivery

Offers us an invaluable glimpse into the hidden history of domestic service in an absorbing narrative, beautifully written with the sensibility of a poet

A compelling portrait of how rich and poor women of this time were locked into a strange and pernicious symbiosis, and a vital warning against social inequality

Alison Light is the author of Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars and edited Virginia Woolf&rsquo;s Flush for Penguin Classics. She has worked at the BBC and lectured at London University. She is currently a part-time Professor at the Raphael Samuel History Centre in the University of East London and also teaches in the School of English at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She is a contributor to the London Review of Books. Her grandmother worked as a domestic servant.

Virginia Woolf was a feminist and a bohemian but without her servants &ndash; cooking, cleaning and keeping house - she might never have managed to write. 
 
Mrs Woolf and The Servants explores the hidden history of service. Through Virginia Woolf&rsquo;s extensive diaries and letters and brilliant detective work, Alison Light chronicles the lives of those forgotten women who worked behind the scenes in Bloomsbury, and their fraught relations with one of the twentieth century&rsquo;s greatest writers.

Alison Light

There are of course memoirs that do astonish and exceed our expectations of mere self-accounting: in recent years, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk; Patti Smith's various autobiographical writings; Lorna Sage's Bad Blood; and Gillian Rose's Love's Work. Alison Light's A Radical Romance now joins this select bunch of books about the self that are not simply self-regarding but truly self-exploratory

Extremely interesting, moving, brilliantly written, as one would expect from Alison Light

A memoir of cauterising honesty. This is a book that deserves to be widely read

An inspiring account of the deep love between Alison Light and her late husband Raphael Samuel

Beautifully crafted...It casts a light on the lightness of love and the profound depression of loss. A truly gifted writer

She writes with precision and tenderness about loss. A Radical Romance is an admirable tribute to a man, a period of rapid change in London, and an unusual marriage

Compulsively readable. Light is a shrewd narrator . . . she reflects with careful psychological and philosophical insight on the reality of loneliness and profound loss following ten years of marriage. Light is also a poet and it shows in certain suppositions or propositions, those observations she posits in high-wire mental leaps.

Part detective story, part Dickensian saga, part labour history. A thrilling and unnerving read

Mesmeric and deeply moving

Remarkable, haunting, full of wisdom

The most powerful family history I have ever read

Penelope Lively, New York Times, on Common People

A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation

Alison Light met the radical social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Twenty years her senior, Raphael was a charismatic socialist from a very different background to Alison's working-class family. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would be dead. 
 
In this chronicle of a passionate marriage, Alison Light peels back the layers of their time together, its intimacies and its estrangements. She tells of moving into Raphael's cluttered 18th-century house in Spitalfields and into his equally full, unconventional life; of the whirlwind of change outside their door which brutally transformed London's old East End districts; of being widowed at 41, and finding inspiration in her friendship with Raphael's mother. A Radical Romance is a luminous and deeply intelligent memoir of love and grief.

Alison Light

Praise for A Radical Romance

There are of course memoirs that do astonish and exceed our expectations of mere self-accounting: in recent years, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk; Patti Smith's various autobiographical writings; Lorna Sage' ...

Extremely interesting, moving, brilliantly written, as one would expect from Alison Light

A memoir of cauterising honesty. This is a book that deserves to be widely read

There are of course memoirs that do astonish and exceed our expectations of mere self-accounting: in recent years, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk; Patti Smith's various autobiographical writings; Lorna Sage' ...

Extremely interesting, moving, brilliantly written, as one would expect from Alison Light

A memoir of cauterising honesty. This is a book that deserves to be widely read

There are of course memoirs that do astonish and exceed our expectations of mere self-accounting: in recent years, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk; Patti Smith's various autobiographical writings; Lorna Sage' ...

Extremely interesting, moving, brilliantly written, as one would expect from Alison Light

A memoir of cauterising honesty. This is a book that deserves to be widely read

Books by Alison Light

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