Margaret Drabble Overview

Lonely pregnancies, jealous sisters, fears of physicality, and loss of identity are Margaret Drabble's specialties. She spins tales of London's upper-middle-class life, and for the past 30 years England has eaten them up. Fans devour her hyper-accurate descriptions of the furniture,... [more]

Lonely pregnancies, jealous sisters, fears of physicality, and loss of identity are Margaret Drabble's specialties. She spins tales of London's upper-middle-class life, and for the past 30 years England has eaten them up. Fans devour her hyper-accurate descriptions of the furniture, values, and personalities of their civilized neighborhoods and mull over her philosophies. ("The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.") Drabble's work ranges from a serious examination of mortgage tax relief in "Safe Houses" to the dissection of everyday heroines in dozens of fictional works (comparisons to George Eliot and Jane Austin abound). She also edited the "Oxford Companion to English Literature," a job her literary pedigree would seem to suit her for: well-known biographer Michael Holroyd is her husband and novelist A.S. Byatt is her sister. One of Drabble's most important works, on both personal and popular levels, is her biography of British novelist Angus Wilson. It was many years after a playful offer to write his life story that Drabble found herself spending long days wheeling a silent, memory-deprived Wilson through his high-society nursing home while researchers ransacked boxes of documents, journals, letters, and photographs in an attempt to re-create Wilson's past. She described the process: "We have responsibilities even to the very long dead but those responsibilities become more worrying the nearer you come to the present, and when you write about somebody you knew, then the anxiety may become intense." Drabble's commitment to the people of her culture, both famous and common, fuels the creation of an impressive collection of books. The London Times beamed: "It is not the accuracy of the observations, the dialogue, and the descriptions which are impressive but the feeling that here is a writer of real intelligence using the English language with precision but without affectation, and shaping words and plot to a clear purpose. She has the cogency of an Iris Murdoch without the creamy symbolism." [show less]