2.BIOGRAFHY OF MARGARET DRABBLE

Margaret Drabble was born on 5 June 1939 in Sheffield, Yorkshire, the second of the four children of John Frederick and Kathleen Marie Bloor Drabble. Drabble has maintained strong ties to Yorkshire in her fiction, and her family claims kinship with another novelist of the region, Arnold Bennett, a connection she mentioned but did not investigate fully in her biography of Bennett

Drabble's parents were both graduates of Cambridge, the first university-educated members of their families, and Drabble grew up in an intellectual, liberal household. Her entire family were voracious readers and writers occupied in pursuing intellectual endeavors. Her father was a barrister and a circuit judge before his retirement in 1973, and her brother, Richard, is also a barrister. Drabble's mother taught English. Drabble's older sister, Antonia Susan is A. S. Byatt, the author of best-selling and highly admired fiction, and her younger sister, Dr. Helen Langdon, is an art historian.

Drabble has said that her childhood was lonely. She loved books and read John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678) at an early age. The children of the Drabble family also wrote magazines, stories, and plays together.

After attending the Mount School, a Quaker boarding school, Drabble was admitted to Cambridge on a full scholarship, and like her mother and her sisters she enrolled at Newnham College. While at Cambridge she read English literature and started acting. In several places she has noted that, while she wrote at Cambridge, she was afraid to show her stories to anyone because of the high critical standards of Cambridge scholars such as F.

In several places she has noted that, while she wrote at Cambridge, she was afraid to show her stories to anyone because of the high critical standards of Cambridge scholars such as F. R. Leavis.

Drabble took her B.A. with first-class honors in 1960 and could have remained at Cambridge as a lecturer, but she wanted to become an actress. She married actor Clive Swift, whom she had met at the university, in June 1960. They had three children-Adam Richard George, Rebecca Margaret, and Joseph Samuel-before their divorce in 1975. On 15 September 1982 she married British biographer and novelist Michael Holroyd.

Soon after their marriage Drabble and Swift went to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, where she was an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave and performed occasional walk-on roles. Drabble became bored with playing small parts, and while she was pregnant with her eldest child, she began work on A Summer Bird-Cage (1963). As Barbara C. Millard points out in DLB 14, Drabble started out to write her first novel as a way of proving to herself that she could be successful in a creative realm other than acting. She also had the examples of earlier successful English woman novelists to reassure her that she had chosen the right literary form in which to express herself.

More biographies [NEXT] [1] [2] [3] [4]

Página creada y actualizada por grupo "mmm".
Para cualquier cambio, sugerencia, etc. contactar con: fores@uv.es
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
Universitat de València Press
Página creada: 29/10/08 actualizada: 02/11/08