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.

Connections

Connections Sort ascending Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Nell Dunn
The critical opinion that ND belonged to the school of Angry Young Men associated her with Alan Sillitoe , John Osborne , and John Braine .
Drabble, Margaret, and Nell Dunn. “Introduction”. Poor Cow, Virago, p. xi - xvi.
ix
The fact that these were each, in different...
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...
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
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...
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 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
Textual Features Michelene Wandor
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...
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
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...
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.
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.

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.