Home is Where The Journeys of a Missionary Child

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, centered around the profound effects on a young girl of being sent away from the heat, color 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.