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
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...
Textual Features Michelene Wandor
This includes work by Nora Bartlett , Sara Maitland , Judith Kazantzis , Wendy Mulford , Libby Houston , Cora Kaplan , Michèle Roberts , Angela Carter , Noel Greig , Rozsika Parker , Alison Hennegan
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
MW has specialized in adapting and abridging novels for radio. Between 1980 and 2004 she adapted a wide array of fiction by women writers, including works by Jane Austen , Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot
Textual Production Mary Stott
Growing up the daughter of journalist parents, Mary Waddington (later MS ) was a journalist in her play as a small child. She told her dolls, I have some copy to write now.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Her first...
Literary responses Muriel Spark
Most English reviews were raves.
Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark. The Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
418
Susan Hill however, in The Times, found this book disappointing in comparison with Spark's early masterpieces, but read it, together with other recent works, as evidence that...
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...
Literary responses Penelope Shuttle
Rosemary Dinnage in a Times Literary Supplement review contrasted contemporary openness about childbirth with the continuing block on mentioning menstruation. She cited a recent example in which Margaret Drabble had mentioned the subject on BBC
Literary responses Elizabeth Robins
Margaret Drabble has connected this incident with the desire for a room of one's own.
Drabble, Margaret. “Amber Reeves (1887 - 1981)”. Breaking Bounds. Six Newnham Lives, edited by Biddy Passmore, Newnham College, pp. 40-51.
49-50
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 Amber Reeves
Margaret Drabble contributed a re-evaluation of AR 's life and career to Breaking Bounds: Six Newnham Lives, 2014.
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...
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
Reception Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Reception Barbara Pym
Another element that makes her hard to place is her comedy. Though her work has been likened to that of Drabble and Lively (both her champions) her place is rather with out-and-out satirists like Angela Thirkell

Timeline

1952: Angus Wilson published Hemlock and After,...

Writing climate item

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...

Women writers item

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...

Writing climate item

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...

Women writers item

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.
86

: Oneword Radio, with offices in London, was...

Building item

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.

Texts

Drabble, Margaret. “1960s”. The Guardian, pp. Weekend 25 - 31.
Drabble, Margaret. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman. Penguin, 2011.
Drabble, Margaret. “A Day Out in Kew”. Jane Austen Sings the Blues, edited by Nora Foster Stovel, University of Alberta Press, 2009, pp. 57-65.
Drabble, Margaret. A Natural Curiosity. Viking, 1989.
Drabble, Margaret. “A return to grass roots”. The Guardian, p. 5.
Drabble, Margaret. A Summer Bird-Cage. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962.
Drabble, Margaret. “A Woman Writer”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 156-9.
Drabble, Margaret, and Jorge Lewinsky. A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature. Thames and Hudson, 1979.
Drabble, Margaret. “Amber Reeves (1887 - 1981)”. Breaking Bounds. Six Newnham Lives, edited by Biddy Passmore, Newnham College, 2014, pp. 40-51.
Drabble, Margaret. Angus Wilson: A Biography. Secker and Warburg, 1995.
Drabble, Margaret. Arnold Bennett. Knopf, 1974.
Drabble, Margaret. Arnold Bennett: A Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974.
Drabble, Margaret. “Books that made me”. theguardian.com.
Drabble, Margaret. For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age. Deutsch, 1978.
Drabble, Margaret, and Nell Dunn. “Introduction”. Poor Cow, Virago, 1988, p. xi - xvi.
Drabble, Margaret. Jerusalem the Golden. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967.
Drabble, Margaret, and Bryan Stanley Johnson, editors. London Consequences. Greater London Arts Association (for the Festivals of London 1972), 1972.
Drabble, Margaret. “Pressure to Perform”. The Author, Vol.
cxii
, No. 4, pp. 162-4.
Drabble, Margaret. Safe as Houses. Chatto and Windus, 1990.
Drabble, Margaret, and Jenny Stringer, editors. The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press, 1987.
Drabble, Margaret, and Jenny Stringer, editors. The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Drabble, Margaret. The Dark Flood Rises. Canongate, 2016.
Drabble, Margaret. “The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance”. Persuasions, Vol.
15
, pp. 75-88.
Drabble, Margaret. “The English degenerate”. theGuardian.com.
Drabble, Margaret. The Garrick Year. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964.