In the preface to Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism, John Belchem draws attention to the way in which ‘Liverpool's past has been characterised as different’. While he argues that ‘Liverpool's apartness … is crucial to its identity’, he concedes that it has both been seen as ‘an external imposition, an unmerited stigma’ and ‘upheld (and inflated) in self-referential myth’. The thrust of Belchem's argument is that Liverpool's exceptionalism is neither a matter for pride nor stigma but is explicable, largely in terms of its identity as a maritime city. Belchem goes on to offer a brief historical survey which includes a consideration of the fluctuating economic fortunes of Liverpool. In this chapter I focus both on the representation of Liverpool and on the representation of Liverpool women at various stages of the city's twentieth-century history, from its Edwardian heyday, through the depression of the interwar years, the German bombing campaign of the Second World War, the economic downturn of the 1980s and 90s to the contemporary resurgence of the city, within novels written by women over the last thirty years. The texts which I will be considering focus particularly on the effects of these economic fortunes on the female inhabitants of the city, whether as wives and daughters of seafarers, dock workers or wealthy merchants, and in some cases as members of the Liverpool-Irish community, which as Belchem points out have tended in recent years to be written out of the history of the Irish diaspora by Irish revisionist historians.

My starting point is the publishing phenomenon of Helen Forrester. The first volume of her four-volume autobiography about her childhood in Liverpool, Twopence to Cross the Mersey, published in 1974, was an early success in a nostalgia market, based on location, but by no means confined to Liverpool. Forrester followed with three more volumes, published in 1979, 1981 and 1985, and two fictional texts written alongside them, Liverpool Daisy (1979) and Three Women of Liverpool (1984). Her later substantial output of fiction includes four further novels about Liverpool, whose popularity undoubtedly owes something to the success of the autobiographies. The publication dates of the retrospective fiction of Forrester, and particularly the autobiographies, are also important in that they largely coincide with a downturn in the economic fortunes of Liverpool, following on from the brief cultural renaissance of the 1960s, which brought the city renewed, if temporary, confidence.