3.BIOGRAFHY OF MARGARET DRABBLE

Margaret Drabble was born in 1939 in Sheffield, in the North of England.
She went to Cambridge University where she studied English Literature.
When she left university, she married an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, did a little acting herself, and then wrote her first novel A Summer Birdcage. It was about two young women wondering what do with their lives.
Drabble had always been very busy working at school and university, then when she got married, everything changed….

"I started writing because I suddenly found myself unemployed… suddenly there was no goal, there was nothing for me to aim for, and that's when I wrote my first novel. I needed desperately something to do which would describe where I was and what I was doing."

Margaret Drabble

A Summer Birdcage was published in 1963 and was immediately very successful.
Drabble continued to write a novel every year for the next few years. She wrote her fourth novel, Jerusalem the Golden in 1967; by then she had three small children and felt exhausted..

Margaret Drabble is particularly fascinated by the role of the mother. She had a difficult relationship with her own mother, who suffered from depression, and Drabble had become a mother herself at a young age. The relationship between mothers and daughters is a theme that recurs in her writing, for example in Jerusalem the Golden.

"I suppose I am obsessed by the woman's role as mother and I think perhaps my mother very heavily influenced me, not always in a very happy way. So I think I'm constantly struggling with the theme of the mother/daughter relationship, I don't think it was one single event, it was a sequence of recurrent events that keep bringing me back to the same problems about my mother, about myself, about my children."

Margaret Drabble

Drabble describes her early work as pre-feminist, since the women's movement only really gathered strength in the 1960s. She touched on subjects which were considered extremely daring and which hadn't been written about before. For example, she wrote about childbirth in her novel The Millstone. A single mother chooses to give birth rather than have an abortion, and does not inform the father. She seemed to touch a chord with women readers in a new and exciting way.

"when I started writing I certainly felt that there were whole areas of life that nobody had looked into at all and that women's lives had changed There was a whole new generation of women educated but without the kind of domestic backup that was traditional, so there was a lot more subject matter to write about. The idea of being a woman on your own, reasonably independent, even if you happened to have a husband you were never the less on own with a lot of problems you confronted. Astonishingly there was very little literature on childbirth. And what was so interesting was that this was a totally common experience but nobody had moved it into poetry and fiction, and I just found that very curious but also quite exciting because it was an unexplored realm"

Margaret Drabble

being a woman writer

"I think in women's lives writing has certainly changed the world that I know and I think the world worldwide has changed. Because when I've travelled abroad, I've noticed there is a community of women around world who have read some of same books, who've written in response to those books and you can feel at home in any country of the world where you can communicate because of this experience of reading one another's writing."

Margaret Drabble

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