Jerusalem the Golden will surely help place Margaret Drabble among the best women novelists in England today. Written with a cool precision of diction and tone that gives pleasure on every page, it is a sophisticated version of the traditional story about a yearning provincial who comes to the big city and is corrupted. Clara Maugham's corruption, however, is a fulfillment. The world of Northam, dominated by her mother, is a kind of hell—cramped, petty, predictable, loveless, and ugly—whereas the world of the Denham family in London is a kind of heaven—open, generous, complicated, intimate, and beautiful. Revolting against a puritan background like her literary cousin, Sister Carrie (though she is more self-aware and less pitied), Clara discovers that Vanity Fair is not an obstacle to salvation but the Heavenly City itself, Jerusalem the Golden. The contrast of the two worlds is finely developed in...