Margaret Drabble
Standard Name: Drabble, Margaret
Birth Name: Margaret Drabble
Nickname: Maggie
Married Name: Margaret Swift
Married Name: Margaret Holroyd
Titled: Dame Margaret Holroyd
MD
is a prolific, resourceful, and often surprising novelist and short-story writer, with a high reputation as a literary historian and critic. She is still widely identified with one of her early styles: the kitchen-sink realist depictions of highly-educated young women enmeshed in wifehood and motherhood. She has become an ambitious chronicler of the rising lifestyle and expectations of the late-twentieth-century professional classes; but also she is a persistent experimenter with techniques of allusion, symbolism, and contradiction of realist expectations.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
Education | Gillian Allnutt | Newnham, established in 1871 as a house in which young women could reside while attending lectures in Cambridge, was in 1971 one of the university's only three all-female colleges. (Since then Girton has begun to... |
Family and Intimate relationships | A. S. Byatt | ASB
's younger sister is novelist Margaret Drabble
. |
Fictionalization | Charlotte Brontë | Jane Eyre has also been subject to a host of feminist revisions. Beatrice Kean Seymour
's The Hopeful Journey (1923) presents a response to, and The Second Mrs. Conford (1951) a reworking of, the novel's... |
Friends, Associates | Elizabeth Jennings | She had a remarkably catholic talent for friendship. During her student days she became a friend of Philip Larkin
and Kingsley Amis
. Her correspondents at this and later periods of her life included her... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Ursula K. Le Guin | Science Fiction and Mrs Brown opens with a long quotation in which Woolf
relates how she observed this shabby, immaculate old lady on a train from Richmond to London, and saw her as the character... |
Intertextuality and Influence | George Eliot | Alison Booth
has traced GE
's influence on Virginia Woolf
, and several critics have anointed Margaret Drabble
as her major successor among contemporary British writers. Booth, Alison. Greatness Engendered. Cornell University Press, 1992. passim Blake, Kathleen. “George Eliot: The Critical Heritage”. The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine and George Levine, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 202 - 25. 223 |
Literary responses | Rosamond Lehmann | Auberon Waugh
likened A Sea-Grape Tree to pulp romance, The Times thought it unintentionally absurd, and Lorna Sage
called the main characters paper people. Thoughtful and positive comments from Elizabeth Jane Howard |
Literary responses | Doris Lessing | The Guardian marked the book's fiftieth anniversary in 2012 with reflections on it by women of four generations. Diana Athill
(born in 1917) says she took against it on its first appearance; she found it... |
Literary responses | Nell Dunn | This first book by ND
was a runaway success, though most of its notoriety was supplied by the television and film treatments. As a book it brought her the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for... |
Literary responses | Nell Dunn | According to Margaret Drabble
, this book was, like its predecessor, another succès de scandale. It was also one of the first post-Chatterley books . . . to treat women's sexuality as though it were... |
Literary responses | Nell Dunn | Margaret Drabble
praised it as treating an important and painful subject with insight, dignity and bravery. She called it accurate without sentimentality or alarmism, and commented on the authenticity of tone produced by Dunn's unparalleled... |
Literary responses | Barbara Pym | Initial comment included reviews or articles by A. S. Byatt
and Marghanita Laski
. Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press, 1994. 198, 199 Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press, 1994. 40 |
Literary responses | Ruth Fainlight | Margaret Drabble
chose this volume when invited to name her books of the year. Evans-Bush, Katy. “The Poet Realized. An Interview with Ruth Fainlight”. Contemporary Poetry Review. |
Literary responses | Amber Reeves | W. L. George
discerned in this novel the profound hopelessness of youth, and called its realism remarkable. George, Walter Lionel. A Novelist on Novels. W. Collins Sons, 1918. 104 |
Literary responses | Amber Reeves | W. L. George
felt that this novel developed AR
's highest quality, the understanding of the ordinary man [sic]. George, Walter Lionel. A Novelist on Novels. W. Collins Sons, 1918. 105 |
Timeline
1952
Angus Wilson
published Hemlock and After, which Margaret Drabble
in 2008 called one of the first gay novels to hit the postwar world.
“Back—due to popular demand”. The Guardian, pp. Review 4 - 6.
4
1965
Giles Gordon
did a series of interviews for The Scotsman with female authors: a species of writer that at the time wasn't particularly recognised, although it certainly had been in the previous century.
March 1969
Novelist Angus Wilson
, recently appointed Chair of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council
, organised the council's first Writers' Tour, to North Wales.
June 1972
Spare Rib, a feminist periodical issued monthly by Spare Ribs
from 27 Clerkenwell Close, London, was launched to put women's liberation on the news stands.
Doughan, David, and Denise Sanchez. Feminist Periodicals, 1855-1984. Harvester Press, 1987.
86
By Summer2000
Oneword Radio
, with offices in London, was set up to broadcast to readers: the bulk of its programming came from audiobooks read serially, sometimes though not always abridged.