The Unfinished Life of Margaret Ann Fairbrook (1923-1968)

Margaret Ann Fairbrook wanted to be a writer. She grew up during the depression and went to college during the war years when men were absent or returning from war. In graduate school at Brown University in a comparative literature class she met a young German-Jewish WWII veteran whose family had escaped early from Nazi Germany. Her journals and letters from those times show their deepening relationship and subsequent marriage and her struggles to see herself as an artist despite marriage and motherhood. As a young mother frustrated and overwhelmed by these competing demands she began to read feminist literature and to analyze the role of women in both life and literature. Her early death leaving four children and numerous unfinished projects motivated her daughter to publish her journals and letters in a story describing and comparing both of their lives.