Jean Lucey Pratt

Jean Lucey Pratt (18 October 1909–August, 1986) was an English writer and bookseller. She published little during her lifetime and is best known as a diarist. Her anonymous Mass-Observation diaries written in the 1940s were featured in three popular books edited by Simon Garfield. A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, published in 2015, is derived from private diaries she kept between 1925 and 1986.

Life

Jean Lucey Pratt was born on 18 October 1909 She took classes in architecture at the Ealing Art School and then entered University College London, where she studied first architecture and then journalism. After university Pratt lived in London, where she planned to become a writer. However, she was unable to find publishers for her novels and short stories. During World War II she worked in the publicity department at High Duty Alloys in Slough.

In 1952, Hurst and Blackett published her biography of the eighteenth-century actress Margaret Woffington. The book, entitled Lovely Peggy: The Life and Times of Margaret Woffington was published under the pseudonym Janet Camden Lucey. Reviewing it in The Spectator, C. E. Vulliamy remarked on the author's "very detailed and accurate knowledge of stage-life in the eighteenth century" and pronounced that the book merited "a prominent place" in "the special category of theatrical biographies". She also published several articles on architectural subjects, including one in the Architectural Review. He described her as "a lyrical and talented writer in her mid-thirties living in a cottage by Burnham Beeches, near Slough". Our Hidden Lives was adapted into a 2005 television film for BBC Four by David Eldridge with Sarah Parish playing the Maggie Joy Blunt character.

As well as her Mass-Observation diaries, Pratt kept a personal diary from 1925, when she was fifteen, until shortly before her death in 1986. These diaries, consisting of 45 exercise books and several hundred additional pages, were inherited by her niece, who in 2013 gave Garfield permission to edit them and publish the result in book form. The diaries themselves were given to Cats Protection, a favourite charity of Pratt's, which holds the copyright.

A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt was published in 2015 by Canongate Books. A paperback edition from the same publisher appeared in 2016. It was widely reviewed and well received, with the London Review of Books calling Pratt's diaries a "priceless find".