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.
Photo of Margaret Drabble signing a book at Beverley Bookfest in Yorkshire on 15 October 2011. She wears a white cardigan over black, a necklace, and glasses.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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.
198, 199
Orphia Jane Allen considers this work a thinly developed
Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press.
40
but effectively ironic, witty view of academia. Anne Wyatt-Brown
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.
104
R. Brimley Johnson implied that its conclusions (about the ordinariness and stupidity of heroines) were...
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.
105
R. Brimley Johnson felt it would have been better if it had avoided tragedy and...
Literary responses Margaret Forster
In a National Women's Register poll of members to determine the best woman writer of the twentieth century, MF came third with twenty-one votes, just behind Margaret Atwood with twenty-five and just ahead of Enid Blyton
Literary responses Amber Reeves
Margaret Drabble contributed a re-evaluation of AR 's life and career to Breaking Bounds: Six Newnham Lives, 2014.
Occupation Rebecca West
The prize went to P. H. Newby 's Something to Answer For, which according to Kermode years later was a compromise decision. Dame Rebecca didn't dislike it as much as nearly all the others...
Author summary Barbara Pym
BP was a distinguished, understatedly comic novelist of the twentieth century, whose autobiographical writings (diaries, letters, and notebooks) were published only after her death.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press.
1-2, 9
Pym, Barbara. “Editorial Materials”. A Very Private Eye, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, p. various pages.
xiii-xiv
Having achieved moderate success during her early career...
Publishing Penelope Shuttle
The couple had already collaborated on several novels, while in the USA Janice Delaney , Mary Jane Lupton , and Emily Toth had published The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation in 1976.
Steffens, Daneet. “Penelope Shuttle”. Mslexia, No. 33, pp. 46-8.
46
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Shuttle...
Publishing Nell Dunn
Both ND 's Up the Junction and Poor Cow were reprinted again as Virago Modern Classics, with introductions by Adrian Henri and Margaret Drabble respectively.
Virago Press: 30 Years of Virago. http://www.virago.co.uk/.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Publishing Nell Dunn
Among many reprints this appeared from Virago in 1988 with an introduction by Margaret Drabble , and in the Bloomsbury Classics series in 1996. It is dedicated to ND 's then baby son Reuben.
Reception Rumer Godden
Reviewers enthused over RG 's narrative style. The book was short-listed for the Booker Prize; Margaret Drabble (biographer of Angus Wilson , who chaired the judges) suggests that Wilson wanted it to win.
Chisholm, Anne. Rumer Godden, A Storyteller’s Life. Pan Books.
287
Reception Anita Brookner
Among other evaluations, Olga Kenyon admired AB 's capacity to represent the interiority and social frustrations of gifted undervalued women:
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan.
2
women with twentieth-century awareness of their problems, which however are problems unchanged since...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Drabble, Margaret. The Gates of Ivory. Viking-Penguin, 1991.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Genius of Thomas Hardy. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976.
Drabble, Margaret. The Ice Age. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977.
Drabble, Margaret. The Middle Ground. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980.
Drabble, Margaret. The Middle Ground. Penguin, 1981.
Drabble, Margaret. The Millstone. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965.
Drabble, Margaret. The Needle’s Eye. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Drabble, Margaret. The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws. Atlantic, 2009.
Drabble, Margaret. The Peppered Moth. Penguin Viking, 2000.
Drabble, Margaret. The Pure Gold Baby. Canongate, 2013.
Drabble, Margaret. The Radiant Way. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.
Drabble, Margaret. The Radiant Way. Penguin, 1988.
Drabble, Margaret. The Realms of Gold. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975.
Drabble, Margaret. The Realms of Gold. Penguin, 1977.
Drabble, Margaret. The Red Queen. Penguin Viking, 2004.
Drabble, Margaret. The Sea Lady. Penguin, 2006.
Drabble, Margaret. “The sexual revolution”. Guardian Weekly, p. 22.
Drabble, Margaret. The Tradition of Women’s Fiction: Lectures in Japan. Editor Suga, Yakuko, Oxford University Press, 1985.
Drabble, Margaret. The Waterfall. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969.
Drabble, Margaret. The Waterfall. Penguin, 1971.
Drabble, Margaret. The Witch of Exmoor. Viking, 1996.
Athill, Diana et al. “Who am I? Who do I want to be?”. The Guardian, Vol.
review 2-4
.
Drabble, Margaret. Wordsworth. Evans Bros., 1966.