The Downing Street Years Literary Analysis

Margaret Thatcher was a Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 1979 and 1990. Three years after her resignation as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher published her first memoir titled The Downing Street Years. The Downing Street Years focuses on the Iron Lady’s years as British Prime Minister (1979-1990) giving glimpses into her life as the political leader of the United Kingdom. Two years later in 1995, Thatcher published her second memoir, The Path to Power that covers her life before she became Prime Minister in 1979. In 2013 The Downing Street Years and The Path to Power were placed in chronologically order and compiled into a single-volume titled The Autobiography. The title The Autobiography suggests a rather signifact shift concerning the literary genre of Thatcher’s works. The Downing Street Years and The Path to Power were originally published and reviewed as memoirs, but by 2013 the single-volume edition was referred as an autobiography. To understand the above mentioned shift between literary genres, a closer inspection

Although both works are book-length they do not cover Thatcher’s whole life instead only certain periods of her life. The Autobiography despite containing The Downing Street Years and The Path to Power is nonetheless an autobiographical book however only because of one change the publisher made. The difference is that the single-volume edition reversed the orders of the works. Narratively, The Downing Street Years the work published first is about Margaret Thatcher’s political career as British prime minister while The Path to Power the second deals with her life prior to 1979. Reversing the order of the two works in The Autobiography creates a narration of events in chronological order thus fulfilling the previously missing requirement of an