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
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 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...
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
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 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...
Literary responses Nell Dunn
According to Margaret Drabble , this book was, like its predecessor, another succès de scandale. It was also one of the first post-Chatterley books . . . to treat women's sexuality as though it were...
Literary responses Nell Dunn
Margaret Drabble praised it as treating an important and painful subject with insight, dignity and bravery. She called it accurate without sentimentality or alarmism, and commented on the authenticity of tone produced by Dunn's unparalleled...
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
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...
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...
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.
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.
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

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.