978 0 232 53408 5
Paperback | 240 pp | 216 x 135 mm
 
‘Margaret Beetham has done a wonderful thing – making the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary, both at once. The word “autobiography” does not feel right: this is literature and theology and feminism (among other things). It recounts a way of growing up which is too nearly forgotten, or lost in either swagger or guilt. Above all she captures that elusive seductive distorted precision of childhood memory and weaves it into a story which is both honourable and beautiful.’
– Sara Maitland, author of A Book of Silence
 
Home is Where tells of the journeys – across continents, over time, and through the challenges of family love, loss and letting go – of Margaret Beetham, whose parents were Helen and Lesslie Newbigin, missionaries in India between the 1930s and the 1970s.
 
The life and thoughts of her father, one of the twentieth century’s most admired missionary theologians, have been well documented, but the experiences of a missionary’s family are rarely told. This is Margaret’s story, centred around the profound effects on a young girl of being sent away from the heat, colour and safety of her Indian home to an old-fashioned boarding school in England, and her relationship with the younger sister nearest to her in age, entrusted to her care in childhood and in later life.
 
Margaret Newbigin Beetham is a retired senior academic who taught for many years in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she was also involved in setting up a Women’s Studies MA. She has published extensively on the Victorian press, particularly as it relates to women, and on other aspects of Victorian print culture. She is a writer, activist, mother and grandmother.