Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd (born 5 June 1939

After attending The Mount School, a Quaker boarding school at York where her mother was employed, Drabble received a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge.

Personal life

Drabble was married to the actor Clive Swift between 1960 and 1975. They had three children, the gardener and TV personality Joe Swift; the academic Adam Swift; and Rebecca Swift (d. 2017), who ran The Literary Consultancy. In 1982, Drabble married the writer and biographer Sir Michael Holroyd; and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists" and that the sisters "always have liked each other on the bottom line."

When sought out for interview by The Paris Reviews Barbara Milton in 1978, Drabble was described as "smaller than one might expect from looking at her photographs. Her face is finer, prettier and younger, surprisingly young for someone who has produced so many books in the past sixteen years. Her eyes are very clear and attentive and they soften when she is amused, as she often is, by the questions themselves and her own train of thought". In the same interview she admitted there were three writers for whom she felt an "immense admiration": Angus Wilson, Saul Bellow and Doris Lessing.

Writing

Drabble's early novels were published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1963–87), while the publishers of her later works were Penguin, Viking and Canongate, and a recurring theme is the correlation between contemporary England's society and its people. Most of her protagonists are women and the realistic descriptions of her figures often derive from Drabble's personal experiences; thus, her first novels describe the life of young women during the 1960s and 1970s, for whom the conflict between motherhood and intellectual challenges is being brought into focus, while The Witch of Exmoor, published in 1996, shows the withdrawn existence of an elderly writer. As Hilary Mantel wrote in 1989: "Drabble's heroines have aged with her, becoming solid and sour, more prone to drink and swear; yet with each successive book their earnest, moral nature blossoms". On the book's fiftieth anniversary in 2015, Tessa Hadley described it as "the seminal 60s feminist novel that Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is always supposed to be". Drabble admitted, years after writing The Millstone: "I didn't realise until many years later that some of the medical details I invented were way off the mark". It is about an heiress who gives away her inheritance.

Her eleventh novel, titled A Natural Curiosity, published in 1989, continues the story of characters from her tenth novel, titled The Radiant Way, which was published in 1987. Drabble apologised to her readers in a preface to A Natural Curiosity and said a sequel had been unintended. Her thirteenth novel The Witch of Exmoor, published in 1996, treats of contemporary Britain. Ursula K. Le Guin compared Drabble's seventeenth novel, The Sea Lady (published in 2006), favourably with her earlier book The Needle's Eye. In 2009, Drabble announced she would cease to write fiction, for fear of "repeating herself". The same year, she published her memoir The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws. Drabble's other writing includes 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.

Awards and honours

Drabble was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in Elizabeth II's 1980 Birthday Honours, and was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours.

  • 1966: John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, for The Millstone
  • 1967: James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Jerusalem the Golden
  • 1972: The Yorkshire Post Book Award (Finest Fiction), for The Needle's Eye
  • 1976: Honorary doctorate from the University of Sheffield
  • 2006: Honorary Doctorate in Letters from the University of Cambridge
  • 2011: Golden PEN Award by English PEN, for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature"

Bibliography

Novels

  • A Summer Bird-Cage, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1963)
  • The Garrick Year, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1964)
  • The Millstone, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1965)
  • Jerusalem the Golden, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1967)
  • The Waterfall, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1969)
  • The Needle's Eye, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1972)
  • The Realms of Gold, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1975)
  • The Ice Age, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1977)
  • The Middle Ground, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1980)
  • The Radiant Way, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1987)
  • A Natural Curiosity, Viking (1989)
  • The Gates of Ivory, Viking (1991)
  • The Witch of Exmoor, Viking (1996)
  • The Peppered Moth, Viking (2001)
  • The Seven Sisters, Viking (2002)
  • The Red Queen, Viking (2004)
  • The Sea Lady, Penguin (2006)
  • The Pure Gold Baby, Canongate (2013)
  • The Dark Flood Rises, Canongate (2016)

Short fiction

  • The Gifts of War (1969), title story republished (alongside "Hassan's Tower") by Penguin Modern Classics on 24 February 2011
  • "Hassan's Tower" (1980), published by Sylvester & Orphanos
  • A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories (2011)

Non-fiction

  • Wordsworth (Literature in Perspective series) (1966)
  • Arnold Bennett: A Biography (1974)
  • For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age (1978) from the 'Mirror of Britain' series André Deutsch
  • A Writer's Britain: Landscape in Literature (1979)
  • Stratford Revisited: A Legacy of the Sixties (1989) from the Gareth Lloyd Evans Shakespeare Lecture
  • Angus Wilson: A Biography (1995) Secker & Warburg
  • The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (2009)
  • Flora McDonnell, ed., Threads of Hope: Learning to Live with Depression (Short Books, 2003, ), with contributions by Margaret Drabble, Wendy Cope, Andrew Solomon, Virginia Ironside, Lewis Wolpert, Alastair Campbell, and Kay Redfield Jamison

As editor

  • London Consequences (1972) – also co-editor
  • The Genius of Thomas Hardy (1976)
  • The Oxford Companion to English Literature (5th and 6th editions)
  • Glenda Leeming. Margaret Drabble (Liverpool University Press; 2004, 2020)

See also

References

  • One Pair of Eyes: Margaret Drabble, BBC2, 9 March 1968, BBC Archive site
  • Margaret Drabble's research files for her 1995 biography of novelist Sir Angus Wilson are housed at the University of Iowa Special Collections & University Archives.