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.
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, 1999.
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, 1995.
Drabble, Margaret, and Nell Dunn. “Introduction”. Poor Cow, Virago, 1988, 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.
Hill, Susan, editor. People: Essays & Poems. Chatto and Windus, 1983.
prelims
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
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.
qtd. in
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, 1990.
