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Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, (born 5 June 1939) is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
Drabble's books include The Millstone (1965), which won the following year's John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and Jerusalem the Golden, which won the 1967 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was honoured by the University of Cambridge in 2006, having earlier received awards from numerous redbrick (e.g. Sheffield, Hull, Manchester,) and plateglass universities (such as Bradford, Keele University, East Anglia and York). She received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award in 1973.
Drabble also wrote biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson and edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature and a book on Thomas Hardy.
After attending The Mount School, a Quaker boarding school at York where her mother was employed, Drabble received a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge. She studied English Literature whilst attending Cambridge. She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960, and, before leaving to pursue a career in literary studies and writing, served as an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Rigg.
Drabble's relationship with her sister A. S. Byatt was sometimes strained because of autobiographical elements in both their writing. While their relationship was not especially close and they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation as "normal sibling rivalry" and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists" and that the sisters "always have liked each other on the bottom line." Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 16 June 1991.
When sought out for interview by The Paris Review's 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.
Her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, was published in 1963. She wrote it, she said, because she had just got married and "the children—I had one and was expecting another—and writing was such a convenient career to combine with having a family". With it she found her "informal first-person narrative voice", which she said was an unexpected discovery. She maintained this approach for her first three books, having "liberated myself from the neutral critical prose of the university essay", which she nevertheless admitted she had enjoyed writing.
Her second novel The Garrick Year, published in 1964, drew upon her theatrical experience. Her third novel, The Millstone, was published in 1965. About a woman with a baby, Drabble made her character unmarried so as to avoid having to write about marriage or the baby's father. She used the personal experience of one of her own children's diagnosis with a lesion (a hole in the heart) to inform her writing on the illness she gave the child. Indeed, Drabble herself wrote The Millstone whilst pregnant with her own child, that is, her third. 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".
Drabble's fourth novel, Jerusalem the Golden, was published in 1967. It is also about an English woman who, not unlike Drabble, is from the north of the country and is attending university in London. Her fifth novel, The Waterfall, was published in 1969. It is experimental. Drabble's sixth novel, The Needle's Eye, was published in 1972. It is about an who gives away her inheritance. Her seventh novel The Realms of Gold, published in 1975, has a lady Archaeology as its central character. Her eighth novel The Ice Age, published in 1977, is set in 1970s England and the social and economic conditions of that time. Drabble's ninth novel The Middle Ground, published in 1980, has a lady journalist as its central character. Margaret Forster, normally one of her kinder reviewers, called The Middle Ground "not a novel but a Sociology treatise".
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. Drabble's fourteenth novel The Peppered Moth, published in 2001, treats of a young girl growing up in a mining town in South Yorkshire and spans four generations of her family. Her fifteenth novel The Seven Sisters, published in 2002, is about a woman whose marriage has collapsed and off she goes to Italy. The Observer referred to part of her sixteenth novel, The Red Queen (published in 2004), as "Psychobabble", noting her claim in the book's preface that she is seeking "universal transcultural human characteristics". 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. In addition, two further novels would in fact follow: The Pure Gold Baby (2013), and The Dark Flood Rises (2016). Speaking in Belfast in 2024, Drabble was clear that The Dark Flood Rises was her final novel.
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, a collection of the 14 short stories that Drabble published between 1966 and 2000, appeared in 2011. 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. Her critical works include studies of William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy. She edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature in 1985 and 2000.
Drabble served as chairman of the National Book League (now Booktrust) from 1980 until 1982.
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