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
Reception Katherine Mansfield
KM 's stories have been credited (in Margaret Drabble 's Oxford Companion to English Literature) as the main channel through which the work of Chekhov (a major and fully-acknowledged influence on her style) reached...
Textual Production Wyndham Lewis
Margaret Drabble notes that in this text Woolf is characterized as Rhoda Hyman, the Empress of High-brow London, a lanky, sickly lady in Victorian muslins with a drooping, intellect-ravaged exterior.
Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A to Z. Facts on File.
147
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 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
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...
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...
Textual Production Susan Hill
SH edited People: Essays & Poems, issued to benefit Oxfam . Contributors (including Iris Murdoch , Margaret Drabble , Anne Ridler , and Elizabeth Longford ) were invited to write about someone influential in their life.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Hill, Susan, editor. People: Essays & Poems. Chatto and Windus.
prelims
Literary responses Irene Handl
Almost all responses to this novel quoted on the cover of its 1985 reprint use somewhere the word original. The Sioux was welcomed at its first appearance by Noel Coward and by Daphne du Maurier
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
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
Textual Production Elaine Feinstein
EF returned to the genre of short biography by contributing (with Margaret Drabble , Claire Tomalin , and others) to Breaking Bounds: Six Newnham Lives, published by Newnham College in 2014. She wrote on...
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.
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.
passim
Blake, Kathleen. “George Eliot: The Critical Heritage”. The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine and George Levine, Cambridge University Press, pp. 202-25.
223
As Gillian Beer notes, GEwas not...
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.
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...

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.