research query, especially for the Brits here

[swan_tower]

I know that properly doing this would require reading more than one book, but I'm trying not to fall down the research well, here.

If I were to read only one book to get a sense of the life a pretty and popular young woman (age circa 18-21) would have lived in late 1940s post-war London, what book should that be?

For my purposes, fiction would likely suffice as well as nonfiction. I'm looking for a sense of culture and society here, rather than specific facts.

Comments

[tchernabyelo.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure, but what I will say is that her social class will make an ENORMOUS difference.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I'm not quite sure what I'm aiming for. Middle-class-ish, I think.

[doriscrockford2.livejournal.com]

Not exactly what you're looking for, but Love Lessons by Joan Wyndham is a diary of a "pretty and popular young woman" living in London in the first years of the war. She was an art student at the time and the book is full of parties. I just checked her wiki page, and apparently she wrote another diary that might cover your period called Love is Blue, but I haven't read that one.

Another book which covers a variety of social classes after the war is Our Hidden Lives, edited by Simon Garfield. They are diaries of 5 people in the immediate post-war period, one of them being "Maggie Joy Blunt, a thoroughly modern young woman, bored out of her mind in a metal company in Slough."

HTH!