With 18 novels, she’s seen it all
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“Yes, I’ve seen a whole literary world roll by,” Margaret Drabble told the Guardian in 2011, a week after she turned 72. The author of a staggering 18 novels, the most recent of which was the highly acclaimed ‘Pure Gold Baby,’ Drabble really has seen it all. From an ingénue who dabbled in acting – working for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, and at one point serving as an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave and Dame Judi Dench – Drabble is now an internationally acclaimed and much-awarded author.
Drabble married young, had children, and started work on what would become her first published novel at the age of twenty-one, soon after graduating from the University of Cambridge, in 1960. Over the decades, her great catalogue of work has been of deep interest to feminists, and though Drabble has said she does not set out to write overtly feminist books, she has been praised for the empathy she brings to her narratives of “ordinary women.” Writing in The Telegraph, one interviewer said of her short stories, ‘Her characters, mostly women, have pleasant smiley outsides but rich inner lives of memory and fantasy, fury and elation.’
However, other interviewers have seen Drabble’s remit as much more ambitious. Writing in the Believer, one journalist noted: ‘The seventies novels, like The Needle’s Eye (1972) and The Ice Age (1977), grow in sociological and political density and display an acute sense for limitations put on humans—not only gender but also class, ethnicity, family structure, the complex web of relations into which we are born.’
No interview with Drabble fails to remark on her family, in particular that one of her siblings is the author A.S Byatt and that the two have long been estranged. Drabble herself has written openly about her troubled relationship with her mother in novels like Jerusalem the Golden (1967) and The Peppered Moth (2001), which saw her grapple with her mother’s heart-breaking depression.
She herself has struggled with depression. She told a journalist at The Telegraph in 2011: “My mother thought her life was boring and disappointing. Mine is neither, so why I get depressed I don’t know. I’ve never taken anti-depressants because the intensity of my feeling makes me write.”
Her long career is strewn with honours such as the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Yorkshire Post Book Award (Finest Fiction).
Drabble is also a critic, screenplay writer and the highly regarded biographer of Arnold Bennett (1974) and Angus Wilson (1995). She was also the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980; made DBE in the 2008 (Honours List) and awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature.
