Margaret Drabble

Dame Margaret Drabble (Margaret, Lady Holroyd) DBE, (born 5 June 1939) is an English novelist, biographer and critic.

Life

Drabble was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, as the second daughter of the advocate and novelist John F. Drabble and the teacher Kathleen Marie, née Bloor. Her elder sister is the novelist and critic A. S. Byatt and their younger sister is the art historian Helen Langdon.

After attending the Quaker boarding-school Mount School at York, where her mother was employed, Drabble received a major scholarship for Newnham College, Cambridge. She studied English and was awarded a starred double first.^{[citation needed]}

She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960, at one point serving as an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave, before leaving to pursue a literary career. Her first novel, A Summer Bird Cage, was published in 1963. She chaired the National Book League (now Booktrust) from 1980 to 1982.

Drabble was married to actor Clive Swift between 1960 and 1975; they have three children, one of whom is gardener and TV personality Joe Swift. In 1982, she married the writer and biographer Michael Holroyd (now Sir Michael); they live in London and Somerset.

Drabble was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1980 Queen's Birthday Honours,^[1] the University of Cambridge awarded her an honorary Doctorate in Letters in 2006, and she was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours.^[2]

In response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq she wrote an article calling herself anti-American, saying "My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me like a disease. It rises in my throat like acid reflux." She closed by saying, "Long live the other America, and may this one pass away soon," referring to the rest of America that did not vote for George W. Bush for President.^[3]

Works

Drabble has published seventeen novels to date. Her early novels were published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1963–87); more recently, her publishers have been Penguin and Viking. Her third novel, The Millstone (1965), brought her the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1966, and Jerusalem the Golden won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1967.

A theme of her novels is the correlation between contemporary England's society and its individual members. Her characters' tragic faults reflect the political and economic situation and the restrictiveness of conservative surroundings, making the reader aware of the dark spots of a seemingly wealthy country. Most of her protagonists are women. The realistic descriptions of her figures often owes something to Drabble's personal experiences. Thus, her first novels describe the life of young women during the late 1960s and 1970s, for whom the conflict between motherhood and intellectual challenges is being brought into focus. 1998's The Witch of Exmoor finally shows the withdrawn existence of an old author. Though inspired by her own life, her works are not mainly autobiographical. Fictional conflicts of everyday life, such as unwanted pregnancy in The Millstone, are not shown in a melodramatic and compassionate manner but with the ironic and witty touch of dry British humour. Her syntax contains among other features a subtle and unexpected use of tenses.^{[citation needed]}

Though best known for her novels, Drabble has also written several screenplays, plays and short stories, as well as non-fiction such as A Writer's Britain: Landscape and Literature and biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. Her critical works include studies of William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy. Drabble also edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.

Bibliography

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Margaret Drabble

• Biography: and a selected bibliography with brief descriptions of most of her works
• Margaret Drabble at Contemporary Writers
• Margaret Drabble at the Internet Movie Database
• The Paris Review Interview
• Works by or about Margaret Drabble in libraries (WorldCat catalog)