Books by Margaret Drabble

 

(I recommend all the books listed below. Please note that I do not earn commission on any sales.)

 

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The Millstone

Rosamund Stacey, an attractive young graduate raised as a feminist and to think of herself as an equal to men, is writing a PhD thesis when she meets BBC announcer George. There is a single, unpleasurable sexual encounter and afterwards Rosamund deliberately lets George disappear out of her life: she is too shy, and unwilling to presume, to tell him that she has fallen in love with him. Discovering she is pregnant, Rosamund initially considers abortion but then resolves to have the baby, feeling confident that she can handle it and that 'the handicap' of one tiny illegitimate child cannot make an iota of difference either to her life or to her academic career. But for the first time middle-class Rosamund, subsisting on a meagre income from academic grants, must make use of the National Health Service, and in the antenatal clinic her eyes are opened to the lives of less fortunate women. She suspects, rightly, that she too will now have to ask for help. The pregnancy, she senses, may have been sent to her in order to reveal a way of living quite divorced from her previous selfish, self-sufficient existence...

Margaret Drabble was acclaimed for writing in a way that was new and hugely influential: about the real experience of attempted abortion, childbirth and motherhood. It remains her bestselling and most celebrated work, and brought Margaret the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1966.

'Very funny, very moving; not to be missed' The Times

 
 

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

A collection of the great Margaret Drabble's complete short fiction in a single volume, stretching in time from the early 1960s to the start of the new century, with the female characters in each story becoming gradually older - from young bride to new mother to merry widow. The men are uniformly unsatisfactory: condescending, pathetic, miserly, or just useless. One is actually dead, much to his widow's relief. About A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Margaret commented:

I was surprised by how angry some of the middle stories were. They were quite feminist and I was a bit surprised because I hadn't thought they were. I thought that was what everybody was thinking. And in fact, everybody was. Women were thinking like that; it wasn't just me.

‘Drabble is one of the most versatile and accomplished writers of her generation...’ Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker