A new book about life as the daughter of a missionary, written by 1958 leaver Margaret Beetham nee Newbigin, has just been published by Darton Longman and Todd.
Home is Where; The Journeys of a Missionary Child, tells of the journeys – across continents, over time, and through the challenges of family love, loss and letting go – of Margaret, whose parents were Helen and Lesslie Newbigin, missionaries in India between the 1930s and the 1970s. The book tells Margaret’s story and centres around the profound effects that being sent away from the heat, colour and safety of her Indian home to be a boarder at Walthamstow Hall in the 1950s had upon her and her younger sister.
Margaret’s book has it’s official launch in London on 14 November and copies can be purchased from the publisher by clicking on the link below.
Margaret is a retired senior academic who taught for many years in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she was also involved in setting up a Women’s Studies MA. She has published extensively on the Victorian press, particularly as it relates to women, and on other aspects of Victorian print culture. She is a writer, activist, mother and grandmother.
Margaret Beetham has done a wonderful thing – making the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary, both at once. The word “autobiography” does not feel right: this is literature and theology and feminism (among other things). Above all she captures that elusive seductive distorted precision of childhood memory and weaves it into a story which is both honourable and beautiful.
