About Margaret Drabble: Margaret Drabble was born June 5, 1939 in Sheffield, , England. She attended the Mount School, , a Quaker boarding-school and was awarded a major scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read English and received double honors (a "starred first"). After being graduated from Cambridge University, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford during which time she understudied for . Her novel won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize and she was the recipient of a Society of Author's Travelling Fellowship in the mid-1960's. She also received the James Tait Black and the E.M. Forster awards and was awarded the CBE in 1980. She is often described as being the author one should read to get a clear view of what it's like to live in England. This is true not only because of her non-fiction books "For Queen and Country" and "A Writer's Britain" but also for her novels. The English personalities of her characters are tangible in her novels which, through the decades, have also reflected the dramatic political, economic and social changes that have taken place in Great Britain.

Running along the same lines as a daytime soap opera, Margaret Drabble’s provides pertinent information about life in Northam, England, a small, quaint town just outside of London, during the mid to late 1900’s. Drabble narrates the novel in third person omniscient which allows her to venture into the minds of the diverse characters.

Although there exists a black and white central conflict, all of the minor conflicts stem from Alix Bowen, the first, and most essential individual. In one way or another, all of the people share some distinct connection with Alix Bowen. Drabble’s description of Alix Bowen’s obsession with a murderer named Paul Whitmore who had held her hostage in the past, allows the reader identify with Alix’s innocence. A good-hearted, well-minded person, Alix Bowen feels compelled to discover how a man of Whitmore’s intelligence could possibly commit the horrible crimes that he did. Drabble also forces the reader to sympathize with Alix Bowen, and to understand her obsession. In showing her unconditional dedication to Whitmore, Alix sets off to locate the father of the murderer.

The reason this infatuation continues relies solely on the fact that Whitmore offers Alix an “intellectual and psychological stimulus of an unusually invigorating nature.” The chain effect remains evident as individual dilemmas that arise between members of a social group ultimately affect the group as a whole, underlying the theme of the novel. Throughout the novel, when two or more people disagreed on an issue, a third party swiftly enters the picture offering either hurt or help to the issue.

In one instance, Carla Davis, a deceitful woman, lays the blame of her husband’s supposed hostage situation in Baldai on Charles Headleand, a thoughtful, caring, gentleman. On another occasion, Liz Headleand begins to act odd when she discovers that her long-time friend, Alix Bowen, repeatedly visits the murderer. Undoubtedly, Margaret Drabble’s strengths far outweigh her weaknesses in A Natural Curiosity. Drabble’s tremendous usage of descriptive adjectives truly brings her characters to life. In addition, the author’s serious, yet sometimes sarcastic tones really add to the lively effect of the novel.

Drabble shows no fear in coming right out and stating her points, and this indicates the sophistication of her style. Symbolism, the most important strength in Drabble’s novel, allows the reader to enter the minds of the characters for themselves without having Drabble do it for the reader. For example, when describing people, the author gives the deceiving characters the dark, evil shades of color, whereas when describing a naive person she uses lighter colors. The lone weakness that stands out in this novel consists of the occasional unnecessary rambling on about certain characters. As Drabble forbids the reader to ever forget about the novel, “Life sets us unfair puzzles....Puzzles with pieces missing.”

Margaret Drabble 1939–, English novelist, b. Sheffield, Yorkshire. Drabble's realistic vision of an England split between traditional values and contemporary desires is apparent in such works as The Millstone (1965), (1969), and (1980), and in her critical studies on Wordsworth (1966) and (1974). Increasingly Drabble's focus has moved from society as a whole to the fate of women, as in (1987), its sequel, A Natural Curiosity (1989), The Gates of Ivory (1991), (2001), whose central character is based on her mother, and The Seven Sisters (2002). She also edited the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985). "I write in order to find out what I don't know. So each book is an exploration or a journey."

Gates of ivory. Liz Headland, a London psychiatrist, receives a cryptic package in the mail. Inside are drawings of Cambodian temple ruins, fragments of a novel by her old friend Stephen Cox, and part of a human finger bone.

Middle ground. Kate Armstrong's a successful fortysomething journalist, divorced, her children grown, and blessed with wonderful friends. She's run through the expected phases of life intensely and passionately. But what now?

Millstone. 1960s London. Rosamund, clever, cool, naive, just down from Cambridge, almost casually loses her virginity to a BBC annnouncer, but there's nothing casual about the result.

A Natural curiosity. Liz is divorced from Charles, but works with him to find out what's happened to their friend, held hostage in the Middle East. Liz's sister Shirley learns the truth about their mother's life and death. Alix, Liz's friend from university days, regularly visits an imprisoned mass murderer, bringing him books about the ancient Britons and trying to track down his long vanished mother. All just natural curiosity.

Peppered moth. In 1912 Bessie was a small girl living in a South Yorkshire mining town. Gifted, she studied hard, waiting for the day to sit the Cambridge entrance exam, her parents in awe of her. Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro, returns to the depressed little town where Bessie grew up.

Radiant way. Liz, Alix and Esther were best friends. They led charmed lives. They were lucky, and it was good to know they had each other when that luck began to run out.

Red queen. Dr Barbara Halliwell receives an unexpected package - a memoir by a Korean crown princess, written more than two hundred years ago. A highly appropriate gift for her impending trip to Seoul for a conference. But who sent it? On the plane she reads the princess's account of the Korean court, the family dramas that left her childless and her husband dead by his own hand, and begins to feel very close to that earlier life.

Sea lady. Humphrey and Ailsa met as children, by the grey northern sea. Now they're returning as distinguished guests to a ceremony where they'll meet for the first time in three decades. Both are apprehensive, as they review the successes and failures of their public lives, and their secret histories.

Seven sisters. Recently divorced from her perfect husband and distanced from her three adult daughters, Candida moves from the countryside to a London flat. What can happen, at her age, to change her fortunes? How will she adjust to the city? She's always had a secret belief that despite all she's a lucky person. Is she right?

Waterfall. Locked in a marriage to Malcolm where her strongest emotion is apathy, Jane's about to give birth to their second child. Malcolm finds this an apt moment to leave her.

Witch of Exmoor. Frieda, an eminent author, has fled her old life to take up residence in a remote, crumbling old hotel by the sea in Exmoor. To her three children, Frieda's always been a powerful and puzzling figure. What is next for this mother of theirs, who late in life developed a passion for Wagnerian opera, abandoned her Saab in a traffic jam, and sued the government over tax returns?

A Natural Curiosity Written by Margaret Drabble

Rich in character and incident, A Natural Curiosity sweeps the reader from smart London townhouses to a run-down embassy in the Middle East, from the splendours of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to drowsy afternoons in the hills of sunny Italy, as we re-encounter Alix, Liz, and Esther, three erudite, middle-aged...

The Radiant Way Written by Margaret Drabble

Set in London and in the north of England, beginning in 1979, this grand and sweeping tragicomedy tells the story of three women –psychiatrist Liz Headleand, art historian Esther Breuer, and social worker Alix Bowen. Strong, articulate, witty, and opinionated, they find their personal and professional lives changed by national political...

The Peppered Moth Written by Margaret Drabble

The Bawtry family has been in South Yorkshire for generations when Bessie is born just before the turn of the last century. The Bawtrys have been content with their humble lot, but Bessie longs for the freedom promised by a new beginning. However, when she succeeds in being admitted to Cambridge...

In the swinging culture of sixties’ London, Canadian Mortimer Griffin is a beleaguered editor adrift in a sea of hypocrisy and deceit. Alone in a world where nobody shares his values but everyone wants the same things, Mortimer must navigate the currents of these changing times. Richler’s eccentric cast of characters...

The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000

DOMINIC HEAD

Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000. Contributors: Dominic Head - author. Publisher: Cambridge University Press. Place of Publication: Cambridge, England. Publication Year: 2002. Page Number: *.

*** REALISM AND EXPERIMENTALISM

The work of Margaret Drabble supplies some of the most interesting examples of how a version of realism might respond to the implications of postmodernity whilst retaining its own integrity and identity. A central difficulty with Drabble is the extent to which her indecisiveness or ambivalence is an enforced formal problem, symptomatic of the era to which she responds. Certainly Drabble incorporates dissonant features in her narratives of the 1980s and beyond, but it might be helpful to see this developing self consciousness (glimpsed, in any case, in her first novel) as a deliberate formal strategy for capturing social disruption and uncertainty. The most obvious feature of this strategy is the use of an intrusive narrator who periodically interrupts the narrative line in Drabble 's trilogy (The Radiant Way [1987], A Natural Curiosity [1989], and The Gates of Ivory [1991]), thus drawing attention to the artifice of the fictional world. This element of self-reflexiveness has, certainly, been sufficiently pronounced to encourage critical speculation on Drabble 's 'postmodern turn'. However, Drabble insistently anchors her fictional world through allusions to actual historical figures and events, marking it quite distinct from the ludic exploration of possible worlds, and levels of being, that is often present in postmodernist fiction.

Drabble 's own comments on mimesis in the post-war British novel suggest a still more coherent strategy of reasserting control. She argues that the use of an intrusive authorial narrator can reinforce the contract between reader and text: the disruptions caused by these narratorial interjections usually involve an admission of blindness or bias (this is certainly so in Drabble 's fiction), and so are tantamount to 'a double bluff' that could be 'designed to aid, not to hinder, the suspension of disbelief'. This principle, which could only really apply in fiction like Drabble 's that seeks so earnestly to understand the contemporary, justifies the 'bossy authorial intrusion' that James Wood, for one, has associated with her work. She has, in short, continued to find ways of developing her realist heritage that do not essentially contradict her view from the 1960s, when she explicitly rejected the 'experimental novel', and identified with realism, even if it meant aligning herself with 'a dying tradition'.

Drabble's trilogy concludes with The Gates of Ivory (1991), a good example of her technical ophistication. The title is glossed by the epigraph taken from Book XIX of Homer's Odyssey, in which Penelope distinguishes between the two gates of dreams: one of horn (truth), the other of ivory (falsehood). The title has various connotations, but at a metafictional level it appears to signal Drabble's ongoing attempt to resuscitate a traditional mode of narrative fiction, both a kind of falsehood and a kind of dreaming, that retains its moral force by suggesting that an alternative 'truth' might arise through its oblique operations. Drabble's own uncertainty, the feature that often makes the trilogy disorientating to the reader, forms the thematic core. The question implicitly posed is whether or not it is still possible to expose the falsehoods of the many gates of ivory with assurance, and to pursue a sustaining moral seriousness in an encounter with an atomized social reality.

The quest is to produce a form governed by such moral seriousness, and it is directly related in the novel to the search of Stephen Cox, celebrated but restless Booker-winning novelist, who has gone missing in Cambodia. His mission, born of political despair, is to gather material on Pol Pot in the search for a grand theme (p. 16), and perhaps, as another character speculates, to produce 'the novel to end all novels' (p. 448). He wants to know why the socialist dream fashioned a road to the Killing Fields. In Phnom Penn, the 'divinely mad' Akira, who speaks up for the Khmer Rouge, appears to mark a natural end to Stephen's mission:

He knows that this is what he came to find. He came to find the last believer. A breath of hope stirs like a sweet corrupt poison in his entrails. It is as though Akira were telling him that God, after all, is not dead, and salvation is still on offer. History is reprieved, the dead did not die in vain, the dry bones will live. (p. 229)

The 'last believer' confirms what he denies: that state socialism has been ex- posed as morally bankrupt, and has been eclipsed by a new world economic order. This version of the End of History, according to which actually existing socialism is extinguished by international capitalism, is Stephen Cox's heart of darkness. The episodes involving Stephen unfold in flashback, and his grim fate, dying after capture by the Khmer Rouge, is felt as an inevitability. The irony of the Conrad motif – in a novel whose characters have a tired and dismissive knowledge of Conrad, even if they have not read him – is that the journey into the Cambodian interior is redundant. Stephen's encounter with the extraordinary Miss Porntip has effectively summarized the End-of- History lesson for him in Bangkok, a lesson that, since they meet on the planefrom France, begins before Stephen sets foot in the East. Miss Porntip is an ex-Miss World, who emerged from an impoverished life in rural Thailand to head her own business empire. This dramatic economic evolution (which has its roots in sex- tourism) is made representative of the triumph of the global capitalism that Miss Porntip so eagerly espouses. After his affair with her in Bangkok, Stephen eventually continues his journey, but he seems more purposeless than ever after this encounter with the dazzling 'New Woman of the East', whose emphatic presence trivializes his mission (p.79).

In the stereotypical and semi-absurd Miss Porntip Drabble unleashes the kind of postmodern forces in caricature that threaten not only Stephen's social vision, but the author's fictional method itself. The strategy, however, is one of containment. Drabble supplies an alternative focus to the seductive, unfettered capitalism of Miss Porntip through the continuity provided by her three main characters, Liz, Esther, and Alix, still struggling to make sense of the social turmoil. These characters, like the social matrices that define them, are more complex, and so more substantial, than the unswerving Miss Porntip. Alix, for example, enjoys a return to those socialist roots that she was losing sight ofn The Radiant Way (p. 111); her convictions, however, are thrown into uncertain perspective, we feel, by her visions of the dead (p. 287), byher reading in chaos theory (p. 440), and by the appeal of religion in the face of mortality (p. 439). This is recognizable Drabble, a method by which characters are embedded in the competing intellectual claims of their day. The texture that results enables the book to out-manoeuvre its own two- dimensional creations, and to enshrine in its form Drabble's aversion to political extremes. The Gates of Ivory continues a process in the trilogy that sees the author driven to elaborate procedures to preserve the core traditionalism of her method. It is a novel, then, that enacts Drabble's political sensibility at the level of form. This intensely serious working through of technical problems is very much a response to a context in which a socialist vision is difficult to sustain. If The Gates of Ivory extends the trilogy's more parochial concern with English politics, bringing it into contact with the capitalist global village, it still takes the felt crisis in the English political scene as its foundation. In this, Drabble is representative of a resistance to the forces of globalization in serious British fiction. Technology and the New Science

The dominant transnational forces of globalization are promoted through developments in science and technology, and this has become an area of human experience that is especially difficult for the novel to register. To engage with rapid technological change, an instantaneous response is demanded, and this is beyond the capabilities of a literary form that is, rather, cumulative in its procedures of reflection and commentary. This sense of relative disengagement, however, can yield an autonomous and longer-term perspective on changes that are inadequately examined in more immediate forms of cultural response. This withdrawn, or philosophical point of view has often led novelists towards an adverse judgement on the implications or applications of technology.

In Winterson's Art and Lies, for example, the technological world in general is an alienated world, where a faith in scientific progress is misplaced: 'the latest laser scan refuses to diagnose' an enduring 'nagging pain in the heart' (p. 8). 'Health' is here conceived as a spiritual dimension, requiring the nourishment of art; technology is the distraction, offering an illusory salvation.

A still more disturbing meditation on technology is found in J. G. Ballard's Crash (1973), a novel that takes the car manufacturer's favourite advertising ploy, the presentation of the car as a commodity imbued with sexuality, to its logical conclusion. A nightmare fantasy of violence and sexual fetishism – and eventual psychological collapse – is the result of this logic. The narrator, one 'Ballard', implicates the author in this ambivalent excursus that focuses on how 'Ballard' is seduced by the jaundiced eroticism of Robert Vaughan, a TV scientist turned 'nightmare angel of the expressways' (p. 84). Vaughan's ultimate goal is to die in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor, as the final expression of the sexualized violence he associates with car crashes and their victims. 'Ballard' and his wife Catherine find themselves bedazzled by'the excitements of a new violence', in which genital wounds become an erotic focus, and where the various other scars of crash victims are reconceived as new 'sexual apertures' (p. 179).

'Ballard' is uncertain in his response to the brand of sexuality that is revealed to him: he considers the technology that generates it by turns 'perverse' or 'benevolent', 'deviant' or 'benign'. But he is aware that the way in which the car crash is equated with a sexual response means that such a response is devoid of a conventional emotional charge: both crash and sex 'were conceptualized acts abstracted from all feeling, carrying any ideas or emotions with which we cared to freight them' (p. 129). The novel thus uncovers the psychological distortion of a commodity culture in which human response is displaced by the machine, a 'technological landscape' where 'the human inhabitants … no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the borderzones of identity' (pp. 48–9). The sense of a 'coming autogeddon' is the focus of this psychological dislocation.

If there is a cautionary note in Crash, however, it also reproduces the extreme it seeks to anatomize. In the enthusiasm of 'Ballard' for 'the new zodiac of our minds' (p. 224), fantasies of sexual violence, conjoining semen, blood, and oil, become depressingly frequent. This makes the book an

Severed Heads, Primal Crimes, Narrative Revisions: Margaret Drabble's A Natural Curiosity

ROBERTA RUBENSTEIN

Why is Margaret Drabble fascinated with severed heads and dismembered bodies? Increasingly in her fiction, beginning with ( 1977 ), images of ismemberment or decapitation form part of the narrative subtext: in The Ice Age, Kitty Friedman is maimed by random IRA violence that kills her husband; another character, Alison Murray, reads with fascinated horror the newspaper account of a woman blown to bits by a bomb. Hugo Mainwaring of The Middle Ground ( 1980 ) has an amputated forearm. In The Radiant Way ( 1987 ), a novel deeply concerned with social and psychological deviance, the imagery shifts from dismemberment in general to decapitation in particular; Drabble employs both classical and contemporary images of severed heads, juxtaposing the figure of the gorgon Medusa with the contemporary serial killings of a murderer who decapitates his victims.1>

Although Drabble did not originally intend to write a sequel to The Ra- diant Way, she felt that the novel "was in some way unfinished, that it had asked questions it had not answered, and introduced people who had hardly been allowed to speak" (Drabble frontispiece). Thus, in a continuing pursuit of answers to questions raised in the preceding novel(s ), Drabble's characters in A Natural Curiosity struggle to comprehend social pathology and deviancy.

Alix Bowen and Liz Headleand are, figuratively, archaeologists in the realms of the psyche and the social order: Liz, a practicing psychotherapist who helps her clients unravel family histories complicated by adoption; and Alix, a social worker and teacher who confesses a deep fascination with "prisons, discipline, conviction, violence and the criminal mentality" (5) and worries that her morbid curiosity reflects darker tendencies buried within her own "nice" self. Despite her deeply law-abiding orientation, as a child Alix had been "haunted by the idea the one day she would find herself in the dock accused of a terrible crime which she had not committed" (19). Fascinated by the "unnatural," she seeks the sources of the pathological behavior of the Horror of Harrow Road, the decapitating

Modern British Women Writers: An A-To-Z Guide

Book by Del Ivan Janik, Vicki K. Janik, Emmanuel S. Nelson; Greenwood Press, 2002 Margaret Drabble 1939- Joseph Zeppetello

One word that comes to mind when one thinks of the writing of Margaret Drabble is “boundless.” She has written thirteen novels, numerous short stories, two biographies, three book-length works of nonfiction, plays, and essays in literary criticism and has edited two major revisions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She is a writer who seems to take no notice of the academic barriers between literary writing and academic writing. Her novels are full of literary and philosophical references, and the plot of her The Witch of Exmoor (1996) begins with the characters asking what type of society they would create if they were starting from scratch. We get a hint of Drabble's thoughts on this from the chapter title “The Veil of Ignorance, ” which comes from John Rawls's Theory of Justice. Drabble lives out her social concerns. In spite of the amount of time she spends on writing, she is well known for devoting time and resources to political causes that are in keeping with her Quaker-inspired social conscience.

Breaking into the literary scene in 1962 with her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, she was dismissed by some critics as a “girls' writer” and after publishing seven more novels was labeled a “Hampstead writer.” In spite of dismissive criticism, Drabble studies have become a solid area for both the English and American literary academies. She is the subject of numerous book-length works of interpretation and criticism and dozens of doctoral dissertations. She continues to satisfy her reading public with thoughtful, somewhat dark, novels whose characters ask the big questions and listen pensively for the answers.

BACKGROUND

Margaret Drabble was born on June 5, 1939, in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, to John Frederic Drabble, a barrister and county-court judge, and Marie Bloor Drabble, a Cambridge-educated school teacher. John Drabble's parents owned a sweets factory, and he worked his way to Cambridge University. Marie Bloor was a daughter of the “Methodist working class” and was the first member of her family to go to university. Both parents, however, shared a strong left-leaning political vision, and Margaret herself was a member of the Labour Party. Author A.S. Byatt is Margaret Drabble's older sister. She has another sister and a brother. All the Drabble girls went to the Mount, a Quaker boarding school, although it is not clear that the Drabbles were Quakers themselves. Joanne V. Creighton in Margaret Drabble claims that the Drabbles were sympathetic to Quaker values and beliefs, but Marie was an atheist, and John attended the Anglican church (19). Valerie Grosvenor Myer in Margaret Drabble: A Reader's Guide mentions that the Drabbles converted to the Quaker religion (16). In any case, the inherently egalitarian and hopeful values and beliefs of the Quakers, especially the belief in “the Light of God” in everyone, have a strong influence on Drabble's novels, as do the contrary Calvinist beliefs in a determined universe in which all are predestined, and free will is an illusion. Many of Drabble's characters puzzle over the themes of free will and determinism. Both Margaret Drabble and her sister A.S. Byatt went to Newnham College, Cambridge, their mother's alma mater, on scholarships.

Drabble married her first husband, the actor , soon after graduation in 1960, and both were members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Although she enjoyed being an actress and was an understudy to famous women of the theater such as Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave, an early pregnancy changed the course of her professional life. Since she could play few parts and spent most of her time alone while her husband was at rehearsalor performing, Drabble began to write to fill her time. Her first novel, A Summer Bird-cage—the title is derived from a bittersweet comment by John Webster about marriage—was accepted for publication by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1962 after arriving unsolicited. The novel was an immediate popular success, but received mixed critical reviews. Some critics regarded the work as a “girls' book, ” while others thought of it as a “work of genius” (Hattersley). A Summer Bird-Cage is about the rivalry between two sisters. More than one critic has looked for parallels in the book between Margaret Drabble and her older sister, A. S. Byatt, and literary connections with the Brontës. Byatt published her own novel about the rivalry between two sisters, entitled The Game, in 1967.

By the mid-1980s Margaret Drabble had produced nine novels and had received critical acclaim as one of England's major writers. Her writing had gone through several major shifts of point of view and subject matter. A Summer Bird-cage (1962), The Garrick Year (1964), and The Millstone (1965), her first three novels, are all narrated in the first person by the main character and dealwith the subjective and personal experiences of well-educated women coming of age in a new world where gender rules had gone through profound changes. Her next two novels, (1967) and The Waterfall (1969), both employ the third person; the former is entirely in the third person, and the latter alternates between third and first. They also show a departure from the feminine themes of the first three novels and take up issues of social mobility. In The Needle's Eye (1972), which is considered a breakthrough novel, Drabble introduces two protagonists, one male, Simon Camish, and one female, Rose Vassiliou, who reappears as a cameo in other novels. Her son, Konstantin, a child in The Needle's Eye, reappears as an adult supporting character in The Gates of Ivory (1991). Drabble employs a large cast of characters in what has been called the “Trilogy of the Thatcher Years”—The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989), and The Gates of Ivory (1991). The Needle's Eye marks the beginning of her middle novels, which include (1975), The Ice Age (1977), and The Middle Ground (1980), and reveals a change in the landscape and characters of Drabble's work. Simon is a trades lawyer, and Rose is an heiress struggling with her sense of social justice. Characters appear in this and subsequent novels from many layers of British society and explore larger emotional, sexual, and religious themes.

Feminists have always had an interest in Drabble, but she does not rest easily with many branches of feminism and can be called at best a moderate or “cautious” feminist (Moran 10). One thing that does bring Drabble in line with more radical feminists is her exploration of the injustices suffered by women, especially well-educated, talented, and ambitious women who choose to have children and are suddenly limited in their possibilities to a world of diapers, car seats, and warmed-over oatmeal. She also addresses the problem of career women who in spite of long workdays are also expected to continue with traditional homemaking duties of raising children, cooking meals, and running households. These themes recur in many of her novels. In many ways Drabble resists being defined as a feminist writer; on the other hand, she is very much concerned with matters of equity and fairness between the sexes. However, she does not feel, as do some radical feminists, that there is something inherently wrong with the traditional aspects of the female role, except when those traditional aspects become unduly limiting because of an unequal sharing of the burden of those roles; and she is “eloquent in her denunciation of households in which both men and women work but the woman is expected to stop at noon and prepare lunch” (Hattersley).

In 1975 Drabble divorced Clive Swift and by this time had become a person of independent means. She has since continued to write, supporting herself through her novels, biographies, and articles and by editing The Oxford Companion to English Literature, which she describes as an “investment in my pension” (Hattersley). In the early 1980s Drabble married the biographer , but continued to live in Hampstead while he lived in west London. In 1996 she moved to join Michael Holroyd after twelve years of marriage. After twenty-nine years the “Hampstead writer” left Hampstead. The name stuck even though two recent novels, The Gates of Ivory (1991) and The Witch of Exmoor (1996), never even mention Hampstead; the former is set partly in Cambodia.

Drabble is a writer who had early success, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for The Millstone (1965), the James Tait Black and E.M. Forster awards, and the CBE in 1980. She continues to write critically acclaimed novels and to work steadily as an author and editor.

ANALYSIS In “Spots of Joy in the Midst of Darkness: The Universe of Margaret Drabble, ” Mary H. Moran writes, “Margaret Drabble's fiction portrays a bleak, often menacing universe, ruled over by a harsh deity who allows human beings very little free will” (32). Many of Drabble's characters struggle with the internal constraints of personality type and the external constraints of money, power, and social position. In many cases Drabble seems to be a Freudian determinist when it comes to the personalities of her characters. In The Realms of Gold Francis Wingate, an archaeologist, Drabble's first strong, successful, professional female character and a late- twentieth-century role model for the liberated woman, is not quite able to accept Freud's views of women, but becomes “more and more convinced that what every woman wanted was a man, and that what every man wanted was a woman, and if they didn't want that they ought to” (Realms 185). While Francis Wingate finds a successful conclusion with a heterosexual marriage, Rose Vassiliou in The Needle's Eye returns to her abusive husband. These two characters in the middle Drabble novels underscore a recurring paradox in her work. While her characters live in a darkly determined universe where free will is almost nonexistent, they seem at the same time to have Nietzschean origins. Rose Vassiliou creates her own existential and moral space from which she views and interprets the world. Her act of renouncing her wealth and choosing to live in poverty shows a level of existential choosing that more often than not baffles Simon Camish. But, if anything, Rose is an ironic Nietzschean heroine, and sister who died in infancy. Paul's mother's rejection, Alix speculates, stems from her preference for the female child who died; her cruel anger was directed toward the male child who survived. Other "lost" sisters appear in other threads of the narrative: Liz Headleand figuratively loses...

Drabble makes a point of this in the last paragraph:

She [Rose] looked at a wall: one of the lions had been broken, … the lion: shabby, weathered, crudely cast in a cheap mould … was hollow inside…. She remembered the beasts on the gateposts at Branston [her childhood home] elevated, distinguished, aristocratic … the shabby mass-produced creature before her was one with the houses…. Half its head was gone. It was one of many. Somebody had written on it, years ago, in red paint: SPURS [A reference to a work by Nietzsche] … it was a beast of the people. (Needle's Eye 368-369) Other philosophical issues are explored in Drabble's novels, including the ethical ideas of Kant, where actions are judged to be good only in and of themselves, and Mill, who argued that the opposite was true—that the goodness or badness of an action needs to be determined only by consequential good or evil. In The Witch of Exmoor the main characters, a privileged group of the upper class, play a parlor game called the Veil of Ignorance, which comes from the work of the twentieth-century philosopher John Rawls, where the participants are asked to imagine a “just society” that they would accept if they had no fore knowledge of their own place in it. The fact that they cannot seem to arrive at a new social arrangement, and their eventual return to their realreason for gathering—to discuss what is to be done about Frieda, their very eccentric mother, who is endangering the family fortune with her erratic behavior—shows the humor and irony of Drabble. It would be a difficult thing indeed for the privileged to see the world through the eyes of the less fortunate, and impossible for them not to be myopic regarding the fate of their personal fortunes. This is the basic irony of the well-educated, socially responsible, upper-middle class that Drabble knows so well. Nietzsche, however, and his concepts of socially constructed good and evil, recur in much of her writing as she continually explores the tension between a deterministic universe and the human need for self-creation. The mystical concept of good and evil being one and the same are part of her “festering subplots, ” especially in The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity . Drabble, however, is not a philosopher. She is a novelist and interweaves webs of images by bringing ideas together from various disciplines that are historically separated in the academic world. References to literary and theological works such as The Pilgrim's Progress, the Koran, and the Bible are juxtaposed with images from classical painting and allusions to Shakespeare, Milton, and other canonical writers, along with references to Freud and Marx, as well as Enlightenment, Renaissance, Christian, and ancient Greek philosophers. Some of her novels come complete with bibliographies, and as Valerie Grosvenor Myer puts it, “It is always unwise not to check Drabble's references, integralto her webs of imagery; it does not do to under- estimate her learning” (149). Two common criticisms of Drabble are (1) that she is a “Hampstead writer” who is preoccupied with the world from the point of view of the privileged and comfortable middle class, and (2) that she is essentially a “women's writer, ” in the very negative sense of the word—that she is a “lightweight.” While it is true that even The Witch of Exmoor deals with a prosperous family wrestling with the idea of inherent social injustice, and that her characters can be absolutely self-absorbed, like Simon Camish, and wrapped in their own personalities, like Francis Wingate, there is always room in their lives for them to integrate with the outside world in a progressive and high-minded way. Simon helps Rose Vassiliou keep her estranged husband from kidnapping her children and in turn gets a glimpse of her personal moral vision. While Drabble's novels are peopled with comfortably middle-class characters, the juxtaposition of the intuitive and the rational, the ever- present social consciousness, the rich philosophical and literary imagery, and the struggle with existential, personal, and political madness keep Drabble's novels from being dismissed as strictly preoccupied with middle-class concerns. The second criticism of her as a writer, that she is a “women's writer, ” is a description she is surprisingly glad to accept (Hattersley). Drabble in this case is referring to the positive definition of women's novels, shared by Doris Lessing, that they are not just novels that happen to be written by women, but are novels that express a certain woman's view of the universe that can be appreciated by any careful reader. This is the point of view that women writers write for everyone, but have a special and individual voice that reflects the same values as men, but in uniquely different ways. No discussion of Drabble could be concluded without mention of the relationship between Drabble and feminism. Ever since the appearance of A Summer Bird-Cage in 1962, Drabble has had a love-hate relationship with feminists. The Needle's Eye, however, is the novel that feminists have the most trouble coming to terms with. Like her other novels, it is traditional in structure, owing more to Edwardian and Victorian realism than to the modernist or postmodernist structures that feminists are more comfortable with, and it is Drabble's least autobiographical work. The main character, Rose Vassiliou, is a battered wife who takes her husband back, stifling her own spiritualde-velopment for the sake of her children. Lynn Veach Sadler writes, “The women's liberation movement has embraced her [Drabble] and rebuked her” (131). What seems to be at the center of the problem with the interpretation of Rose's behavior in The Needle's Eye is Drabble's own vision of Freudian determinism. She allows her characters to change, but not by much. Rose is destined to return to her abusive husband because of her fundamental formation as a person. In Drabble's world epiphanies do not lead to deep changes or understanding of self so much as they lead to acquiescence. Francis Wingate in The Realms of Gold, however, is a character who shapes her life through an exercise of will and determination. She is in many ways the feminist “superwoman.” However, she finds happiness in the end by marrying her male lover, a resolution some feminists would find wanting. The Thatcher Trilogy is populated by self-assured professional women, including Liz Headeland, a psychiatrist (a secular priestess) who has an ambivalent attitude toward the men in her life, with the possible exception of her second husband Charles, the first lover to give her an orgasm. She seems to be a mixture of Francis Wingate and Rose Vassiliou. In true Drabble fashion, though, Charles is the worst type of financial opportunist, who leaves Liz in order to marry into wealth and social position, yet returns to her to help nurse her back to health, a very nineteenth-century plot device, when in The Gates of Ivory she falls ill after going to Cambodia to look for Stephen Cox. The Trilogy is full of holes, penetrations, buried memory, and dismemberment (both physical and psychological), yet resists a feminist reading. This resistance may be due to Drabble's insistence on Freudian motivations in characters, which puts her at odds with much of postmodern feminism. Drabble herself seems less interested in women's issues as such than in social issues and global awareness. This awareness brings her back to feminism, though, in her concern for equity and fairness.

ASSESSMENT

It is difficult to write conclusively about a living writer as prolific as Margaret Drabble. She has already produced a large body of work that has given her worldwide recognition as a novelist, critic, biographer, and editor. In her own way she is an anachronism, refusing to adopt modernism and, in her reworking of Edwardian and Victorian realism and naturalism, taking a turn toward postmodernism (Rubenstein). Indeed, her last three novels brought about comparisons with Dickens as a socially responsible writer writing state-of- the-nation articles for late-twentieth-century Britain. With her solid readership, she should continue to lend her unique literary voice to the canon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

A Summer Bird-Cage. London: Weidenfeld, 1962; New York: Morrow, 1964.

The Garrick Year. London: Weidenfeld, 1964. New York: Morrow, 1965.

Laura (play). Granada Television, UK, 1964.

The Millstone. London: Weidenfeld, 1965; New York: Morrow, 1966.

Jerusalem the Golden. London: Weidenfeld; New York: Morrow, 1967.

“The Sexual Revolution.” Manchester Guardian Weekly (12 October 1967).

The Waterfall. New York: Knopf, 1969; London: Weidenfeld, 1969.

“Baffled! Margaret Drabble Stalks Uncomprehendingly around the Mystery of Masculinity.” Punch 24 July 1968: 122-124.

“Women Novelists.” Books 375 (1968): 87-90.

A Touch of Love—Thank You All Very Much (film). : British Lion, 1969; United States: Columbia Pictures, 1969.

London Consequences. Coedited with B.S. Johnson. London: Greater London Arts Association, 1972.

“Margaret Drabble on Virginia Woolf.” Harper's Bazaar and Queen September 1972: 90-91.

The Needle's Eye. London: Weidenfeld; New York: Knopf, 1972.

“A Woman Writer.” Books 11 (Spring 1973): 4-6. Rpt. in On Gender and Writing. Ed. . London and Boston: Pandora, 1983. 156-159.

Arnold Bennett: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld, 1974; New York: Knopf, 1974.

“The Writer as Recluse: The Theme of Solitude in the Works of the Brontës.” Brontë Society Transactions 16 (1974): 259-269.

The Realms of Gold. London: Weidenfeld; New York: Knopf, 1975.

The Genius of . Ed. Margaret Drabble. London: Weidenfeld; New York: Knopf, 1976.

The Ice Age. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977; New York: Knopf, 1977.

For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age. London: Deutsch, 1978; New York: Seabury, 1979.

A Writer's Britain. London: Thames & Hudson, 1979; New York: Knopf, 1979.

“Margaret Drabble: Cautious Feminist.” Interview with Diana Cooper-Clark. Atlantic Monthly November 1980: 69- 75.

The Middle Ground. London: Weidenfeld, 1980; New York: Knopf, 1980.

“ 'No Idle Rentier': Angus Wilson and the Nourished Literary Imagination.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 13 (Spring 1980): 119-129.

“An Interview with Margaret Drabble.” Interview with Joanne V. Creighton. In Margaret Drabble: Golden Realms. Ed. Dorey Schmidt. Edinburg, TX: Pan American University, Schoolof Humanities, 1982. 18-32.

Introduction. Not I, But the Wind. By Frieda Lawrence. London: Granada, 1983. vi-xii. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Ed. Margaret Drabble. 5th ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Ed. with Jenny Stringer. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

The Radiant Way. London: Weidenfeld, 1987; New York: Knopf, 1987.

A Natural Curiosity. London: Penguin, 1989; New York: Viking, 1989.

Safe as Houses. London: Chatto, 1990.

The Gates of Ivory. London and New York: Viking, 1991.

Angus Wilson: A Biography. London: Secker, 1995; New York: St. Martin's, 1996.

The Witch of Exmoor. London and New York: Viking, 1996; London: Penguin, 1997.

The Peppered Moth. London: Viking, 2000; New York: Harcourt, 2001.

Secondary Sources

Allan, Tuzyline Jita. Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics: A Comparative Review. Athens: Ohio UP, 1995.

Bokat, Nicole Suzanne. The Novels of Margaret Drabble: This Freudian Family Nexus. New York: Lang, 1998.

Bowen, Roger. “Investing in Conrad, Investing in the Orient: Margaret Drabble's The Gates of