Common People: In Pursuit of My Ancestors - Softcover

Alison Light is the author of the acclaimed Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. She is Honorary Professor in the Department of English at University College, London, and a contributor to the London Review of Books and writes regularly for the British press. Common People was shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize in Non-fiction and was a Book of the Year in the Times, Telegraph, Financial Times, Spectator, History Today, and the Scottish Herald.

"This is a richly peopled book. . . . Common People is a great deal more than a family history. Light is a literary historian, and her talent here has been to use her skills not just to pursue individuals through the thickets or record offices and county archives, but to set them within their historical era. . . .The achievement of Common People is its triumphant demonstration of the interplay between individual lives and the somber backcloth of economic circumstance. . . . The effect of Common People is to make you aware of the hidden network of anyone’s ancestry. In illuminating her own, Light serves up the most powerful family history I have ever read." (Penelope Lively New York Times Book Review)

“Above all a work of quiet poetry and insight into human behaviour. It is full of wisdom.”
(Times (UK) Book of the Week)

“I read Common People with a mixture of admiration, awe and sorrow. . . . It is a remarkable achievement and should become a classic, a worthy successor to E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. It is full of humanity.” (Margaret Drabble)

“By turns mesmeric and deeply moving: a poetic excavation of the very meaning of history.” (Daily Telegraph)

“Common People tells the story of Alison Light’s own experience of looking for her ancestors: a quest for origins, explanations and the filling of absences. It is also a moving meditation on the role of family history and on the nature of history itself. . . . The results are inspiring. Few historians can match Light’s ability to see a subject anew and explore it with imagination and humanity.”
(Times Higher Education)

“Remarkably gifted at investing bare archival facts with emotional valence, Light delivers a history-from-within that makes readers care deeply about a great-grandmother who enters the world as a workhouse baby and leave s it as a pauper lunatic, about a great-great-grandfather who suffers an ineluctably downward trajectory in employment that finally lands him in a workhouse. Readers do learn about the larger historical dynamics driven by the Industrial Revolution, British imperialism, and two world wars, yet the individual never disappears from view. A cross-grained family history that transcends its genre.”—Booklist (Booklist)

"Professional historians tend to regard family history as a poor cousin of the history of societies or nations. But as Alison Light shows in this meticulous, moving study of her antecedents, 'once the branches proliferate, families become neighborhoods and groups, and groups take shape around the work they do and where they find themselves doing it.' The personal is always public. . . . Ms. Light's book is full of moments where the public and the personal intersect to quietly devastating effect." (Wall Street Journal)