Dipped in Ink

A multigenerational memoir of working-class womanhood in 20th century Britain, centring on the extraordinary family history of one of our greatest living novelists - Pat Barker

Patricia Margaret Drake was not a wanted child. Born in 1943 in the working-class north-east of England, her arrival was met with dismay by all involved. Her childhood was a solitary and often precarious one, marked by absences and unanswered questions.

Many decades later, Dame Pat Barker has defied the odds to become a bestselling and widely beloved author, a Booker Prize winner, a national treasure. But in all her years as a storyteller, Pat never shared the story of her own life with anyone – not even with her own daughter, Anna.

Five years ago, following a health scare, Pat began talking to Anna about her childhood for the first time. Over many months, she revealed a complex story of secrets and parallel lives, illegitimacy and poverty, of loss and grief, labour and ambition, love and self-sacrifice, mothers and daughters. And Anna, herself also a writer, started teasing out the tangled threads which connect this vanished past to her own life.

Dipped in Ink is a literary family portrait, centring on Pat Barker and opening out, concertina-like, to reveal several generations of women who came before her. Vividly and candidly told, by turns painful and defiant, with flashes of dark humour, Dipped in Ink is an emotional duet between mother and daughter and a memorial to a century of foremothers whose lives were shaped and often cruelly constrained by circumstance and social expectation. Through this remarkable family history, Anna Barker reveals a much broader story of working-class womanhood in twentieth-century Britain.