[This entry was updated by Nora Foster Stovel (University of Alberta) with the entry by Barbara C. Millard (La Salle University) in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 60--78.] Margaret Drabble's rise as one of the most...

Margaret Drabble's rise as one of the most important and well-known British novelists writing today has been steady and sure. She has received serious attention in Great Britain since the appearance of her first novel, and since the publication of The...

Since the 1970s Margaret Drabble has been the preeminent British woman of letters. Critics and admirers have compared her work to that of George Eliot and Jane Austen, and, indeed, Drabble's writings, like Eliot's, include fiction, literary criticism,...

Margaret Drabble The Red Queen Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005. Pp. 334. $32.99 $20.00 The Red Queen, the sixteenth novel by Margaret Drabble, marks a postmodernist departure for this popular writer. Clues are in the subtitle, "A Transcultural Tragicomedy," in the epigraph...

Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001. Pp. 369. $34.99 The Peppered Moth, Margaret Drabble's latest publication, is a novel. Or is it? The book opens with the dedication "For Kathleen Marie Bloor" and ends with an afterword that begins, "This is a novel...

On Jan. 31, 2005, the BBC made it official: On the evening news, the anchor gravely announced the publication of Ian McEwan's new novel, Saturday, and proclaimed the author "the international voice of British fiction." As far as anyone in London publishing circles can remember,...

The novels of Margaret Drabble tell an old story, the struggle of the individual toward identity, and her version of the tale is extreme. Her heroines suffer confusions about the self that, at times, border on the pathological…. Like children, Drabble's women struggle. Her stories emerge from the anarchy in which Freud locates the origins of human consciousness. Awareness of self develops, according to Freud, as the infant first identifies with the human figures surrounding it. The child wakes...

The Waterfall is "the most female of all [Drabble's] books" not because, as she suggests, it begins with childbirth and ends with a thrombic-clot induced by contraceptive pill-taking, but because it considers the situation of a woman who does not deny her generic femininity, whose first words in the novel, far from asserting her will, announce her essential passivity: "If I were drowning I couldn't reach out a hand to save myself, so unwilling am I to set myself up against...

Clearly we are meant to take The Ice Age seriously, not as a diversion, and readers must indeed be prepared for a good deal of moralising as they follow the adventures of a collection of singularly unsympathetic characters. Since she is writing about England in the Seventies, Miss Drabble is presumably making her ice age symbolise the current period of economic stagnation, and if her grim-faced prose is anything to go by, moral stagnation too. She does not, alas, give any hint as to the direction in which o...