A Day In The Life Of A Smiling Woman - Plot & Excerpts
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 published, in the magazine Nova in 1968. ‘Stepping Westward’ was written on commission for the Wordsworth Society in 1994. In actual fact, however, Drabble read it aloud at the annual meeting of this association in the Lake District at Grasmere, but it was not published until the year 2000 in the Massachusetts literary magazine The Long Story. In this volume, therefore, it appears as the last of the stories Margaret Drabble has published so far.Other stories were kept for a time in a drawer for different reasons. ‘The Caves of God’, for example, was not destined for the Time Out anthology; Drabble wrote it for a book about ‘secrets’ which was never published. She rescued it when Nicholas Royle asked her for a story for his collection.Two fragments from two of her novels, not included here, were published as short fiction in magazines: ‘The Dying Year’, an excerpt from The Radiant Way, was published in Harper’s magazine in July 1987, and ‘The Dinner Party’, taken from A Natural Curiosity, appeared in Harper’s in September 1989.
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