Gender, Culture and Social Change in the Fiction of Margaret Drabble

ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS, LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES GENDER, CULTURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE FICTION OF MARGARET DRABBLE TALLA ABDULLAH RASHID A thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Anglia Ruskin University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Submitted: July 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my special appreciation and thanks to my supervisor, Professor Mary Joannou, who ploughed through several drafts of this thesis, gave me the courage to strive and the stimulus to write, and has been an invaluable source of guidance and constant encouragement throughout the several years of preparing this thesis when great changes in my life happened. She is exemplary as a supervisor and a scholar. Additional thanks must go to Professor Valerie Purton who gave me very incisive comments and helpful suggestions on the final draft of the thesis. l am indebted to Andy Salmon, Acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters, for his understanding and support when this was needed. Outside the sphere of academia, I am indebted to my parents. Though far away, their emotional support was always by my side and their belief in me has been unfailing – it is to them that this work is dedicated. Last but not least, I would like to thank Areen and Nma, my lovely son and sweet daughter, who both challenged and inspired me as a mother. I appreciate their patience and to them this work is dedicated as well. i ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY ABSTRACT FACULTY OF ARTS, LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DOCTOR OF PHILIOSOPHY GENDER, CULTURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE FICTION OF MARGARET DRABBLE TALLA ABDULLAH RASHID July 2018 This thesis, which is feminist and historicist in its methodological approaches, explores the social, cultural and political circumstances in which Margaret Drabble's nineteen novels were produced by using close textual reading to position her novels in their historical context. The core objective of this thesis is to establish the relationship between Drabble's fiction and the changing face of English society since 1960s. This is in addition to her literary exploration of some global issues that were of concern to Drabble, being an opponent of many aspects of British and American foreign policy including the Iraq War and a supporter of the rights to self-determination of the Kurdish people; the context in which l first came across both her discursive writing and her fiction in Kurdish northern Iraq. This thesis is divided into five chapters which deal with the fiction broadly chronologically with the exception of chapter four. Chapter one deals with the first five novels of Drabble by putting them in historical context of the 1960s, which are A Summer Bird-cage (1963), The Garrick Year (1964), The Millstone (1965), Jerusalem the Golden (1967), and The Waterfall (1969). Chapter two presents Drabble as a ‘condition of England’ novelist analysing the representation of modern Britain in The Needle's Eye (1972), The Realms of Gold (1975), The Ice Age (1977), The Middle Ground (1980) and The Radiant Way (1987). Chapter three deals with the influence of Arnold Bennett on Drabble's writing and his attitudes to provincial life. Additionally, it demonstrates how Drabble moves from local issues to global crises in A Natural Curiosity (1989) and The Gates of Ivory (1991). Chapter four is concerned with literary influences that have been important to Drabble and considers the critic F. R. Leavis, the poet William Wordsworth, and the novelists Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. Chapter five deals with The Witch of Exmoor (1996), The Peppered Moth (2000), The Seven Sisters (2002), The Red Queen (2004), The Sea Lady (2006), The Pure Gold Baby (2013) and The Dark Flood Rises (2016) and brings together different themes and concerns which have already dealt with in Drabble's earlier novels. This thesis takes issue with some common misperceptions of Drabble as being a ‘Hampstead novelist,’ an old-fashioned realist, and a ‘women's writer’. My thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by providing an up-to-date overview and critical account of all Drabble's novels beginning with the 1960s and taking the reader up to the present. ii CONTENTS Introduction Page 1 Chapter 1: Page 16 Gender and Social Change in Margaret Drabble's Novels of the 1960s Chapter 2: Page 46 Margaret Drabble and the ‘Condition of England’ Chapter 3: Page 89 Beyond the Condition of England: From the Local to the Universal Chapter 4: Page 140 Margaret Drabble, Romanticism and Realism: The Influence of Wordsworth, Austen, Eliot, Woolf and Lessing Chapter 5: Page 176 Margaret Drabble and The Art of Growing Old Conclusion Page 229 Works Cited Page 231 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Page 164 Undated letter from Doris Lessing to Margaret Drabble Figure 2 Page 165 A letter from Doris Lessing to Margaret Drabble on 12 June 2006 Figure 3 Page 166 A letter from Doris Lessing to Margaret Drabble on 29 July 1992 Figure 4, 4a and 4b Page 167-8 A letter from Doris Lessing to Quentin Bell on 3 March 1992 Figure 5 Page 169 A letter from Doris Lessing to Margaret Drabble on 20 March 2008 Figure 6 and 6a Page 169-70 A letter from Doris Lessing to Margaret Drabble on 12 December 2008 Figure 7 Page 171 A letter from Drabble to Professor Bryan Sykes on 18 May 2008 Figure 8 Page 172 A letter from Professor Bryan Sykes to Drabble on 16 June 2008 Figure 9 Page 173 A letter from Doris Lessing to Margaret Drabble on 12 May 2008 iv ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY GENDER, CULTURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE FICTION OF MARGARET DRABBLE Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with (i) Anglia Ruskin University for one year and thereafter with (ii) Talla Abdullah Rashid This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is bound by copyright. This work may: (i) be made available for consultation within Anglia Ruskin University Library, or (ii) be lent to other libraries for the purpose of consultation or may be photocopied for such purposes (iii) be made available in Anglia Ruskin University’s repository and made available on open access worldwide for non-commercial educational purposes, for an indefinite period. v INTRODUCTION Margaret Drabble (b.1939) is a writer of longevity whose publications span four decades of the twentieth-century and the first two decades of the twenty-first. She is the author of nineteen novels beginning with A Summer Bird-cage published in 1963. Her most recent is The Dark Flood Rises (2016). Drabble, who was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1988, is also the editor of the fifth and sixth editions of the reference work The Oxford Companion to English Literature, published in 1985 and 2000. She has also published numerous articles, short stories, and works of criticism and has written for the screen and the stage: Isadora (1968), A Touch of Love (1969) and It's a Woman's World (1964) as well as literary biographies of Arnold Bennett (Arnold Bennett: A Biography) (1974) and Angus Wilson (Angus Wilson: A Biography) (1995). In 1992 Dame Margaret deposited ninety boxes of personal papers containing a life-time of correspondence with many writers including Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes and R. S. Thomas in the Cambridge University Library, as well as original drafts, typescripts and working papers of her memoir, biographies, short fiction, novels and communications with personal friends and cultural and educational institutions around the world. Unfortunately, no financial provision was made for the papers to be catalogued and the part-time cataloguer who was appointed and began work left and was not replaced. The Cambridge University Library has a non-negotiable policy of prohibiting access to uncatalogued materials. Despite several requests to the library, and representations by my supervisor to Dame Margaret through her literary agent, l was not given permission to work in the Drabble archive, although l was allowed one visit in which l was able to see the handwritten manuscript of A Summer Bird-cage (1963) and materials which had been catalogued relating to The Peppered Moth (2000). l deeply regret that my thesis has had to be written without access to a uniquely important resource for any scholar trying to understand Drabble's writing, the experiences of a generation of women who came of age 1 in the 1960s, and the literary and intellectual life of the past six decades. ln May 2018 l was given permission to work on the Doris Lessing/Margaret Drabble correspondence (1978-2008), available at the University of East Anglia. Dame Margaret has been generous in providing answers to questions about her life and work in numerous interviews conducted in person over the years. These interviews provide many revealing insights into how her thinking has evolved and l have drawn extensively upon them in my research, quoting liberally, throughout the thesis, placing Drabble's own words in context, and providing an appropriate critical commentary. The most significant interviews which can be found in print or online are those with Nancy Hardin (1973), Peter Firchow (1974), Nancy Poland (1975), Barbara Milton (1978), Diana Cooper-Clark (1980), Parker and Todd (1983), Kevin Courier (1987), John Hannay (1987), David Plante (1988), Olga Kenyon (1989), Eleanor Wachtel (1996), Suzie Mackenzie (2000), The Oklahoma Review (2000), Nick Turner (2010), Lisa Allardice (2011), Claudine Peyre (2011), Lydia Perović (2014), and Lynn Barber (2016). There is at present no monograph or doctoral thesis which provides an up-to- date overview and critical account of Drabble's publications beginning with the 1960s and taking the reader up to the present.

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