At the turn of the millennium Juliet Gardiner, who has died aged 82, came to the realisation that though she had a respectable reputation as a freelance historian, she had yet to write the books that would be unmistakably hers. Over the next decade or so, she produced three major works, based on deep original research, on mid-20th-century Britain that at last did justice to her talents.

Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 (2004) provided a huge panoramic narrative-cum-portrait of the Home Front. “Sixty years after the end of the war,” she reflected in her foreword, “if the ‘big picture’ of a nation united in courageously facing a common enemy holds steady – as it surely does – so too do the ‘short stories’, the details of people’s varied experiences of war that complicate and nuance that picture.”

Much of the micro detail came not only from the diaries and reports of Mass-Observation – the social research project launched in 1937 – but also from resourceful use of the riches of the Imperial War Museum. The result was the fullest, most realistic, most balanced survey since Angus Calder’s groundbreaking The People’s War (1969).

The Thirties: An Intimate History (2010), arguably her masterwork, made us look anew at that decade. The wealthy and the privileged appeared, of course; so too, often heartrendingly, did the poor, the unemployed, the Jarrow marchers.

But what made it so special was the unerring, in-depth treatment of the too often overlooked in-betweens – above all, those white-collar, lower-middle class people who found in rapidly growing suburbia a balm for their anxious sense of social status and a world they could call their own. Casting the net of her research yet wider, much else featured – including the obvious landmarks such as the Abdication crisis – but there lay the book’s heart, implicitly pointing the way to the more privatised, individualistic future that ultimately awaited.

Later in 2010 came, to mark the 70th anniversary, The Blitz: The British Under Attack, a more detailed examination than in Wartime, and again avoiding an unduly London-centric approach.

The Guardian’s reviewer (Hester Vaizey) justly applauded “a treasure trove of vivid, detailed anecdotes”, but the book also tackled full on the place of the blitz in British national mythology, concluding – surely rightly – that while the image of the chirpy, ever-cheerful Cockney had been badly overdone, there was still ample evidence of real fortitude in adversity and even real community spirit.

All three books are underpinned by a clear belief in the social historian’s abiding purpose. This was, in Juliet’s own later words, the “attempt to capture the historical moment and what mattered to those living in it”.

She relished travelling around the country “in search of letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, newspapers, privately published local history booklets, cartoons and photographs”. Another key quality was the sustained high quality of her writing, evocative as well as clear, not least on subjects such as fashion and interior décor, prompting some especially memorable passages in The Thirties.

Complementing a keen analytic intelligence was a deep-rooted common sense, an instinctive and often humorous understanding of the realities of everyday life – an understanding that undoubtedly owed something to the distinctive circumstances of her own life.

Born in the East End of London, she was the daughter of parents who within months gave her up to what until 1946 was called the Church of England’s Incorporated Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays (now the Children’s Society). She was adopted by a conventional middle-aged, middle-class couple, Dolly and Charles Wells – a council sanitary inspector – in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, with whom she largely failed to bond. On New Year’s Day 1960, as a 16-year-old bored with Berkhamsted school for girls, she left home of her own accord.

Her destination was Bristol, where soon she was sharing her life with George Gardiner – eight years older, an Oxford graduate in philosophy, politics and economics, and already with Conservative political ambitions.

They married in 1961, set up home in London (soon on a Span estate in Blackheath), and three children followed over the rest of the decade. By the 1970s it was an increasingly semi-detached marriage; their politics differed sharply; and the role of subservient, sweetly smiling political wife, after George became an MP in 1974, was not a happy fit.

As the marriage faltered, eventually ending in divorce in 1980, Juliet started following her own interests, including achieving a first-class history degree at University College London (1976) while still largely responsible for childcare, and embarking on research for a potential PhD on Charles de Gaulle’s relationship in the war with the French resistance.

Then in 1979 she became assistant editor of History Today, followed by three years as editor from 1982. In that position she did much to make a struggling magazine financially viable, while at the same time becoming increasingly aware of – and encouraging – new developments in history, especially relating to gender and race.

A decade and a half ensued of being in effect a jobbing historian, while holding posts at the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1985-89) and Middlesex University (1992-2000). She wrote a handful of good books, but they were mostly tie-ins to either a TV series, as with D-Day: Those Who Were There (1994) and The 1940s House (2000), or an exhibition, as with Over Here: The GIs in Wartime Britain (1992) and From The Bomb to the Beatles (1999), as opposed to books indisputably in their own right. In 1989 she married the US historian Henry Horwitz. They divorced and remarried before his death in 2019.

The golden spell of her heavyweight trio of books started shortly after I first met Juliet, through our shared literary agent, Deborah Rogers: Juliet told me that her particular dark night of the soul had come on Millennium Eve in New York. The success it drove her to ended abruptly when she was diagnosed with a rare brain tumour, and started using a wheelchair.

Plans and hopes for new, research-dependent books had to be dropped. Nonetheless, with the help of her friend Lara Feigel, in 2017 Juliet brought out her compelling but non-egocentric memoir Joining the Dots: A Woman in her Time, mainly about her first four decades, seen in a larger historical context.

She is survived by her children, Alexander, Sophie and Sebastian, and six grandchildren.

• Juliet Gardiner, social historian, born 24 June 1943; died 16 June 2026