Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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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
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.
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...
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
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, 1918.
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.
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, 2014, pp. 40 -51.
49-50
Literary responses
Arnold Bennett
However, a reviewer for the Times felt that aspects of the work, such as Bennett's notion that articles might be suggested by everyday occurrences (getting up in the morning might result in pieces on 'Queer...
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
Literary responses
Arnold Bennett
Margaret Drabble
began work on her biography of AB
(published in 1974) in a partisan spirit, because she felt Bennett was seriously undervalued. She was, she wrote, surprised to find she enjoyed and respected...
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.
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.