Margaret Drabble

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.

Milestones

5 June 1939

MD was born in Sheffield in Yorkshire, the second in a family of four children.
Sadler, Lynn Veach. Margaret Drabble. Twayne.
1
Creighton, Joanne V. Margaret Drabble. Methuen.
21

By 23 September 1965

MD published her third novel, The Millstone, about bearing a baby out of wedlock.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
The British National Bibliography. Council of the British National Bibliography; British Library, Bibliographic Services Division.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
3317 (23 September 1965): 820

By 22 May 1969

MD published The Waterfall; written in the voice of an other woman, it engages extensively with the conventions of Victorian women's novels.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
3508 (22 May 1969): 549

25 April 1985

MD made her mark as a scholar when she published her redesigned and entirely rewritten edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
4273 (22 February 1985): 191

Biography

Birth and Background

5 June 1939

MD was born in Sheffield in Yorkshire, the second in a family of four children.
Sadler, Lynn Veach. Margaret Drabble. Twayne.
1
Creighton, Joanne V. Margaret Drabble. Methuen.
21