Written in 1962, this book takes us back to the beginning of the era when women were starting to push back against the assumption that, even if they went to college, they would marry and have kids right after. Sarah, our narrator, is a bit surprised that her older sister, the stunningly beautiful...
Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone begins with an introduction into the mindset of the narrator Rosamund, a scholar focusing on her PhD in Elizabethan sonnet sequences while living in her middle class parents flat in England. In the beginning, Rosamund carefully explains her previous reservations a...
When circumstances compel her to start over late in her life, Candida Wilton moves from a beautiful Georgian house in lovely Suffolk to a two-room, walk-up flat in a run-down building in central London--and begins to pour her soul into a diary. Candida is not exactly destitute. So, is the move pe...
There are a few interesting commentaries here about social class, family relationships, and especially the squabbling that goes on over inheritance. BUT in general I thought it was boring, lacking in suspense, and in need of a good editor.First, there are several points in which Drabble contradi...
I've always liked Margaret Drabble's work more than that of her (more successful?) sister, A.S. Byatt. This may be just a residual consequence of having "met" her while I was in college. She had been invited to lecture by someone in the English department, and at the time I used to hang out with ...
Clara has broken away from the stifling respectability of her northern home to live her own life in London. Through her close friendship with Celia Denham she enters a world of dazzling educated people and wealthy bohemians. Clara yearns to be part of their constellation.
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,...
After reading the first third of this book, I was left feeling quite angry and patronised about a narrative fictional account of working class life in South Yorkshire, England. As Yorkshire (and South Yorkshire itself) is my birthplace and former neck of the woods, I felt angry that lives, be the...
A very strange book, consisting of two separate parts which really didn't seem to go together at all. In the first part, the ghost of the Red Queen tells her story from the afterlife. The manner of the telling is disjointed, but the style fits the subject matter: the queen, or “Lady Hong”, is tr...
Some of them, however, may offer a variation as to their dates of composition. ‘A Pyrrhic Victory’ was probably the first story that Margaret Drabble wrote, when she was a student at Cambridge University in the late 1950s, but it was not until she was an established writer that it was finally pub...
‘Real dead people,’ insisted Ollie. Jess found the remains of a packet of dry old Rowntree’s fruit gums in the bottom of her bag. Ollie chose black, Anna orange. They sucked, exhausted, silenced, as the bus made its way past Nelson and the lions and round Trafalgar Square. Yes, we all thought Oll...
The jigsaw as metaphor and simile is everywhere. It is used as a logo by Microsoft Word and by the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and it pops up on the screen of the Barclays Bank Hole in the Wall. Those instantly recognizable little shapes, dubbed in friendly fashion by Perec 'les bonhommes' (t...
He felt as though he had lost her. At first he thought that he had resigned her, to Christopher’s greater claim – he could not get Christopher out of his mind, his muttered, monotonous complaint, his tale of woe, his plateful of fried eggs, his wretched goldfish, his air of desertion – and then h...