Margaret Drabble (Dame Margaret Drabble, actually) was creating feminist heroines well before the second wave of the women’s liberation movement began in the late 1960s. Although in 2009 she declared she’d never write another novel because she feared repeating herself, she has completed several works of fiction since. (Writers cannot help writing, it’s as necessary to them as breathing.)
In my opinion Drabble’s early work is her best. Therefore I’d like to discuss several of her early novels: A Summer Bird Cage (1963), The Garrick Year (1964), The Millstone (1965), and The Waterfall (1973).
In these four novels, Drabble more or less observed the unities: that is, there is one point of view, that of the protagonist; one setting (either London or a city in the provinces); and one plot. In A Summer Bird Cage, we meet Sarah during a channel crossing from France to England, on her way home for the wedding of her elder sister, Louise. She tells of sitting on the deck, eating the bars of chocolate she’d bought for the journey and watching people barfing over the rails. “People kept being sick and this cheered me, as I never am and I like feeling tougher than others.”
“Feeling tougher than others” is not what the majority of young women in the early 1960s hankered for: most of us yearned to be pretty and popular. Relentlessly brainwashed by American society and culture, we didn’t know how to aspire to anything better.
Reflecting on the reason for her journey, Sarah considers her current situation:
I hadn’t really been doing anything in Paris. I had gone there immediately after coming down from Oxford with a lovely, shiny, useless new degree, in a faute-de-mieux middle-class way to fill in time. To fill in time till what?
The preceding quotation drives home the point that life has changed for many women, if not all. The year 1963, when this novel was published, was a time when women could aspire to be teachers, nurses, or secretaries, and little else.
When Sarah arrives at her parents’ house, she hears from Louise that home is full of people milling about, awash in wedding presents, and their awful cousin Daphne is poking her nose into everything. Louise complains that the local dressmaker couldn’t make heads or tails of the measurements for Sarah’s bridesmaid dress. “And as for sending your measurements in centimeters, Miss McCabe was quite out of her depth.”
Sarah replies imperturbably that there aren’t any inches in Paris and in the next paragraph describes her elder sister as a “knock-out beauty. She really is. People are silent when she enters rooms, they stare at her on buses, they look round as she walks down the street.”
Thus Drabble sets up the essential situation of this novel—the relationship between the two sisters. Sarah constantly feels either ignored or belittled by Louise. She envies her elder sister’s beauty, although assuring the reader that “if there is a dividing line separating the sheep from the goats” she is definitely on Louise’s side of it.
Although Louise also possesses a degree from Oxford, she lacks a sense of vocation as much as Sarah does. However, Louise is getting married; Sarah, stuck in England because her future husband is in New York on a fellowship, goes to London to look for a flat and some sort of job. She bumps into Gillian, a fellow graduate from Sarah’s year at Oxford, who is “working quite pointlessly at Swan & Edgar” [a department store] and separated from her husband. The two begin sharing a flat and carry on with their lives: Gill wonders whether to go back to her husband and Sarah, in the absence of Francis, her future husband, seeks out Louise but continues to be repelled by her sister's indifference.
As difficult as life remains for many women in modern society, at least the job situation has improved—bright, shiny degrees from Oxford or Harvard or Yale are no longer useless. Sarah, keenly intelligent, views the much freer, emotionally independent life of the men she knows, men whose futures offer many more opportunities than those available to her, with envy. “This is a subject about which I get very bitter with very little encouragement,” she notes, before going on to say that with regard to the emotional lives of women, “we, in order to live, must be open and raw to all comers.”
A Summer Bird Cage, like many of Drabble’s early books, is not long on plot; rather, it explores the relationship between Sarah and Louise (which does in fact change), and Drabble’s writing is a pleasure to read. At one point Sarah speaks of Italy, which she loves so much that the very thought of its cities sends her into bliss: “Siena, Fiesole, Verona…even the names are so incantatory they can put me under.” Earlier in the novel, when Louise meets her at the train station after Sarah arrives back in England, the two drive to their parents’ house: “It was getting towards dusk and the autumnal colors were deeper and heavier in the sinking light: the fields of corn were a dark brown and gold, dotted ecstatically with poppies.”
The Garrick Year explores a situation that still bedevils family life today: domesticity vs. career, the importance of the wife’s job compared to that of the husband. When the story opens Emma, the mother of a little girl and a nursing infant, has just got her life “tidily arranged,” as she puts it. A former model, she’s used her connections to secure a part-time job reading the news on television for three hours per evening, five times a week. She is feeling delighted by this until David, her actor husband, tells her he’s been invited to star in a play in the provinces. Emma is outraged but realizes in the end she and the rest of the household, including Pascal, the French au pair, will have to go with him. Her pleasant new job is kaput.
In Hereford David goes about his work at the Garrick Theatre while Emma settles into domesticity. After a few months she discovers David is having an affair with one of the actresses in the play. Infuriated, Emma embarks on a liaison herself but soon has qualms about it and stops. Part of her wants a career of her own, but the pull of motherhood is too strong: she realizes that until her children are much older, she will simply have to follow David wherever he goes. The witty narrative style in which Drabble writes the character of Emma is amusing to read. Many of us have felt the same emotions as this character.
Very different from Sarah’s and Emma’s relatively uncomplicated problems is the situation of Rosamund Stacey, the protagonist of The Millstone. When the novel opens she is working on her doctorate in literature and trying to balance her relationships with two different men. Each thinks the other is her lover, so neither importunes her with his own demands. In actual fact she has never had a sexual relationship, but this situation doesn’t last long. She somehow has a one-night stand with a man she barely knows, following which, to her great consternation, she realizes she’s pregnant.
In 1965 this was a serious situation, so serious and so stigmatizing that some young women committed suicide to avoid the disgrace. Others married the man responsible or went into hiding and relinquished the child to adoption. Rosamund, after trying and failing to end her pregnancy by drinking gin while sitting in a bathtub full of hot water, gives up on the idea of abortion. She decides to relinquish, but Fate has other plans for her. When her newborn baby girl is put into her arms, Rosamund looks at her and realizes that “what I felt for her was love.”
Quietly, she invites a friend to share her flat, which Rosamund is allowed to occupy by herself as her parents are on a year-long sabbatical in Africa. The money from Lydia’s rent payment will help out when Rosamund is no longer able to work at her studies.
Complications ensue but by the book’s end Rosamund is able to put “Dr.” in front of her name. Fortunately for her and her daughter, society’s sexual mores were to change so much by 1970 that her unmarried mother status would not even occasion a lift of the eyebrow. A movie based on The Millstone, called “Thank You All Very Much” and starring Sandy Dennis, was released in 1968.
When I began reading The Waterfall (published in 1973), I really wanted to like it because I’d enjoyed Drabble’s previous books. However, I’d hardly got into the book when I conceived a deep loathing for Jane, the protagonist.
Shortly after the book opens we see Jane recovering from childbirth and feeling rather ill. Her first child is staying temporarily with Jane’s mother as Jane’s husband has left her and seems unlikely to return. Jane is unworried by this; in fact, she doesn’t worry about anything, even though she now has no source of income and hardly enough food in the house to get by. (In her situation I would have been paranoid.) Jane’s cousin Lucy and Lucy’s husband James come to keep Jane company immediately after the birth. After the first night or two Lucy stays home and only James shows up. Despite the fact that Jane has just thrown up, James gets into bed with her, even though, Jane says, “my hair smelt of being sick.”
Well, that’s odd behavior for someone with a baby that’s a few days old, but in fiction all things are possible. It was when I read the following passage that I nearly yanked my hair out by the roots:
Jane…reflecting…(on her mother and her mother’s sister)…on the amazing apparent control with which her mother and her mother’s generation had planned their lives and their families—family planning had been a meaningful phrase to them, whereas to her and most of her generation it seemed a fallacious concept quite out of date, a bad joke, like those turban hats women had worn in war time to conceal their uncherished hair. She herself had never understood contraception and disliked what she had understood of it; she had acquired, after her son’s birth, a Dutch cap [Britspeak for diaphragm] but she disliked it so much that when he found it in a drawer one day she let him take it out and sail it in the bath for a few nights until he was bored with it, and it perished.
When I think of the countless numbers of women throughout history who have died from excessive childbearing, and how desperately women sought Margaret Sanger’s advice and help in the early years of the 20th century, I just want to scream when someone says that contraception is “a fallacious concept, quite out of date.” Margaret Sanger was constantly harassed by the police and persecuted in the press for the work she was doing. Thinking of contraception as “a bad joke” makes me want to climb into that book and yank
Jane’s hair out by the roots.
Revolted as I was, I could hardly bear to go on reading it: I think Jane started having an affair with James or something but by that time I didn’t give a rodent’s posterior what she did. I terminated the perusal.
After her early novels, Drabble began experimenting with the novel form, even going so far as to use the omniscient viewpoint in The Realms of Gold. Although I really like that book—Frances Wingate, the protagonist, is so real to me that I half-expect to bump into her at the airport some day—I dislike the omniscient viewpoint. Multiple viewpoints are permissible in 1,000-page supernovels, as long as we are in one viewpoint at a time, but hopping from one mind to another on the same page and inserting little asides such as “Let’s leave Janet pushing the pram down the High Street and return to Frances” are intolerable. But again, that’s my opinion.
Speaking for myself, although I tried once or twice to read a couple of Margaret Drabble’s later novels, I never could get into them, any more than I could get into Possession, written by Drabble’s elder sister, A. S. Byatt. I couldn’t even get through the first chapter of that one, it was so boring.
To summarize, I enjoy the protofeminist perspective of the female protagonists in Drabble’s early novels, and her use of language is often sublime. Occasionally I reread the ones I like.
What about YOU? Is there a writer whose early work you admire but whose later work leaves you cold? Or, to turn the question around, is there a writer whose later work you admire but whose early work bores you right out of your gourd? Really? Come on, tell us about it! Inquiring minds want to know.