ACCLAIMED Cumbrian novelist Margaret Forster has died of cancer aged 77, her husband Hunter Davies announced.

The award-winning author, whose best-known works include Georgy Girl and Diary Of An Ordinary Woman, died on Monday, February 8, at the Marie Curie Hospice at Hampstead.

Born in Carlisle, Ms Forster split her time between London and Loweswater, in the Lake District, where she and Mr Hunter resided during the summer.

She initially worked as a teacher at a girls' school in Islington, north London, before her writing career took off.

Her big break came with Georgy Girl, the story of a young woman in 1960s London who is romantically pursued by her father's older employer and the young lover of her promiscuous and pregnant flatmate.

The book was turned into a successful film starring Lynn Redgrave as Georgy, Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates and James Mason.

Speaking about his wife, author and founder of the Cumbria Book of the Year Mr Davies, said: "She was the cleverest woman I ever met."

He said she won a scholarship to go to Oxford, adding: "But actually she was clever in a much better and nicer way.

"She was emotionally clever, in that she could always understand people and predict their actions and their feelings and their motives, which I can never do.

“She was a remarkable woman in every way.”

Ms Forster, who was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975, was a prolific writer, with novels including Have The Men Had Enough? (1989), The Memory Box (1999), and Lady's Maid (1990).

She was also an acclaimed non-fiction author, with her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning winning the Heinemann Award in 1989 and her work Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life Of The Renowned Storyteller winning the Writers' Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction in 1993.

In 2014 she wrote a memoir, My Life In Houses, which told the story of her life from a Carlisle council estate, via Oxford, to London's Hampstead and her Lake District home.

It followed two previous memoirs, Hidden Lives (1995) and Precious Lives (1998), which focused on her family and their history.

Her latest novel, How To Measure A Cow, will be released on March 3, and features a woman who leaves London to start a new life in a Lake District town.