Margaret Drabble
born June 5, 1939, Sheffield, Yorkshire,
Eng.
English writer of novels that are
skillfully modulated variations on the theme
of a girl’s development toward maturity
through her experiences of love, marriage,
and motherhood.
Drabble began writing after leaving
Cambridge University. The central characters
of her novels, although widely different in
character and circumstance, are shown in
situations of tension and stress that are
the necessary conditions for their moral
growth. Drabble is concerned with the
individual’s attempt to define the self, but
she is also interested in social change. She
writes in the tradition of such authors as
George Eliot, Henry James, and Arnold
Bennett.
Drabble’s early novels include A Summer
Bird-Cage (1962), about a woman unsure of
her life’s direction after dropping out of
graduate school, and The Millstone (1965),
the story of a woman who eventually sees her
illegitimate child as both a burden and a
blessing. Drabble won the E.M. Forster Award
for The Needle’s Eye (1972), which explores
questions of religion and morality. Her
trilogy comprising The Radiant Way (1987), A
Natural Curiosity (1989), and The Gates of
Ivory (1991) follows the lives of three
women who met at Cambridge during the 1950s.
In The Peppered Moth (2000) Drabble detailed
four generations of mothers and daughters in
a Yorkshire family. The Sea Lady (2007)
traces the relationship of a man and woman
who met as children before either became
famous—he as a marine biologist and she as a
feminist—and ends with their reunion. In
addition to her novels, Drabble wrote
several books on the general subject of
literature, as well as journal articles and
screenplays. She also edited the Oxford
Companion to English Literature.
