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Summary
Summary
Margaret Drabble's novels have illuminated the past fifty years, especially the changing lives of women, like no others. Yet her short fiction has its own unique brilliance. Her penetrating evocations of character and place, her wide-ranging curiosity, her sense of irony--all are on display here, in stories that explore marriage, female friendships, the English tourist abroad, love affairs with houses, peace demonstrations, gin and tonics, cultural TV programs; in stories that areperceptive, sharp, and funny. An introduction by the Spanish academic José Fernández places the stories in the context of her life and her novels. This collection is a wonderful recapitulation of a masterly career.
Author Notes
Margaret Drabble was born on June 5, 1939 in Sheffield, England. She attended The Mount School in York and Newnham College, Cambridge University. After graduation, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford during which time she understudied for Vanessa Redgrave.
She is a novelist, critic, and the editor of the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Her works include A Summer Bird Cage; The Millstone, which won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in 1966; Jerusalem the Golden, which won James Tait Black Prize in 1967; and The Witch of Exmoor. She also received the E. M. Forster award and was awarded a Society of Authors Travelling Fellowship in the 1960s and the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1980.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This collection from one of the United Kingdom's finest contemporary fiction writers reflects both the development of dame Drabble's work as well as the decades in which societal expectations for women-and women's expectations of themselves-were rapidly shifting. With the first story having originally been published in 1964 and the last in 2000, readers will enjoy following the leitmotifs of Drabble's worlds while also recognizing the evolution of her craft and the choices or her heroines. A marked consistency also defines Drabble's characters, though. Often complex, usually unsettled, these women defy compartmentalization. Nearly all also retain a constant inner-monologue, by which Drabble provides an intriguing contrast to the "show-don't-tell" mantra of so many American short story writers. The women in these stories do tell, at least to themselves, what they're feeling and thinking and wondering, even-or especially-when they're actions don't easily mirror their thoughts. "The Gifts of War," about a young mother so smitten with her young son that she's ignoring the abuses of her drunken husband, and "A Success Story," in which an established playwright turns down the advances of a celebrity but remains frank (with herself) about her desires, are particularly compelling. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Fourteen stories published over four decades offer an agreeable supplement to the distinguished British novelist's full-length fiction (The Sea Lady,2007, etc.).The early pieces from the 1960s show Drabble's (The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws, 2009, etc.) smooth, reflective prose style already well developed as she focuses on the difficulties of marriage and the temptations of infidelity. "Hassan's Tower" is a grimly funny tale of a couple already mired in mutual hostility while honeymooning in Morocco; the overseas journey of adulterous lovers in "Crossing the Alps" is nearly as disastrous, for different reasons. The title story (the collection's best) echoes the feminism-tinged novels in which Drabble reached her prime (Jerusalem the Golden,1967;The Needle's Eye, 1972), thoughtfully exploring the life of a modern woman prompted by a cancer scare to reconsider her complicated juggling of commitments to work, a difficult husband and her adored children. Similar ground is covered with even more bite in "Homework," narrated by the envious, sniping "friend" of a successful but overstressed career woman. The sharp social consciousness that became an increasing feature of Drabble's work beginning withThe Ice Age(1977) is less evident in her short fiction, although "The Gifts of War" stingingly juxtaposes a beleaguered working-class mother with two patronizing student protestors, and the linked stories "The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance" and "Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale" show middle-class women encountering glamorous representatives of the English landed gentry. Drabble can be acid, as when a woman unforgivingly recalls her dead husband's many petty cruelties in "The Merry Widow," but more often her tone is warm. "The Caves of God," which closes with the protagonist's tender reunion with her ex-husband more than a decade after their divorce, is characteristically gentle about human failings and hopeful about the possibility of redemption and reconciliation.Nothing revelatory, but Drabble's fans will savor these bite-sized examples of her humane intelligence.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* British novelist Drabble, a writer of acid wit, keen plots, and psychological acuity, hasn't published many short stories. This complete volume contains 14, originally published between 1964 and 2000. Nonetheless, she uses the form with distinct poise and power. Electrifyingly precise and darkly funny, Drabble has a talent for orchestrating startling turning points and moments of truth. Journeys are a favorite conceit, as is ascension, as her characters hike up hills or lift themselves from despair. A priggish fellow on his honeymoon in Morocco is miserably alienated until he and his wife climb a tower and gain a vision of the commonality of humanity. A fuming young woman visiting Elba with friends commits an act of vandalism that stuns everyone, herself included. Drabble is eviscerating in her portrayals of women saddled with angry men, and she is intrigued with the struggles of women who have attained fame and aroused resentment, including a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and a covertly brilliant television journalist. How profoundly Drabble understands pain and stoicism. She also has a mythic feel for landscape and the awe nature inspires, thus anchoring her masterfully drawn characters and their provocative dilemmas to the larger, living world in stories as piercing as they are dazzling.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE discursive spaciousness of Margaret Drabble's voice and vision lends itself to the long form, as her 17 splendid novels demonstrate. This may help to explain why her "complete short stories" make up so slender a volume. Drabble, it seems, just didn't have enough time to write short stories (with apologies to Mark Twain). Of those collected here, 14 in all, the earliest dates from the 1950s, the most recent from the 1990s. Some are reed slim, but many glimmer with the irony, lyricism, moral vision and (despite their page counts) amplitude we associate with Drabble's novels. They reflect back to us the last half of the 20th century, albeit in Drabble's often 19th-century voice. Here is the Vietnam era, resurrected in the heartbreaking 1970 story "The Gifts of War." Here, in the title story, "A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman," is the liberated heroine of second-wave feminism who can do it all. Wife, mother, TV personality, sought-after star, she ends her crazed day smiling broadly, center stage, as she distributes Speech Day prizes, all the while bleeding profusely, if invisibly, into her boots. The heavy-handed irony of the story's title and metaphors (that smile, that blood) seems just as emblematic of the year it was published, 1973, as do its protagonist and her resentful brute of a husband. The central character of the wry yet poetic tale "The Caves of God" seems representative of a later era, the 1990s. A scientist (sister to many such female professionals in Drabble's fiction), she has won the Nobel Prize for discovering "the Vanity Gene," which "added so much to our understanding of peacocks and paradise birds, of gender and display." A publicity-shy "peahen" herself, she hates the thought of future biographers exploring her personal life, so she sets out to erase it. This leads her to her long since lost-from-view first husband, once given to self-display, now a recluse in pursuit of spirituality in a hut in Anatolia. During their sublime final encounter, "the past forgave her, and she forgave the past." No such reconciliation occurs in "The Merry Widow," a 1989 story whose heroine breathes a deep sigh of relief at the death of her censorious, tyrannical husband. "Divinely, enchantingly, rapturously alone," she sets off on the two-week holiday in Dorset they had planned together. Only the reader accompanies her into the unmistakably English countryside near the mill house she has rented: "The weeds swayed and poured in the stream. Water crowfoot blossomed above the surface, its roots trailing. Trout rippled, stationary yet supple and subtle, motionless yet full of movement. . . . The paddock, she discovered, was a sort of island. . . . The stream was fringed with all sorts of wild flowers, growing in rich profusion and disorder - forget-me-not, valerian, comfrey, buttercup. . . . A wild garden, overgrown, secret, mysterious. Nobody could overlook her here." Although her hard-won solitude soon disappears, she will get it back, along with her self-possession, as she triumphs over an old man with a scythe who comes to cut down what she loves. It is her "passion for identifications" that will save her, her thirst to name things and thereby make them her own. When she names her adversary, he ceases to be that, and human connectedness and continuity are restored. These are Margaret Drabble's great themes. Even in the midst of the most exquisite natural landscape, it's the human creature who matters, the human mind that creates meaning, the human heart that makes of her fictional universe "an immense romance." Nancy Kline's most recent book is a new René Char collection, "Furor and Mystery and Other Writings," which she translated and edited with Mary Ann Caws.
Library Journal Review
Written over a span of 50 years, the stories collected here chronicle relationships in all their messy variations, from first meetings through marriages, love affairs, betrayals, abuses, and estrangements. From the Fifties to more recent times, Drabble has always skillfully depicted the experiences of women in their eras. "Hassan's Tower," for instance, deals with a disastrous honeymoon where magnified misunderstandings and unexpressed resentments underline how very little love exists in this new marriage. "Crossing the Alps" is the tale of a long-planned illicit getaway for a pair of lovers that goes terribly wrong when an illness makes one of them incapable of romance. In the affecting title story, a popular television personality who appears to balance work and life cheerfully and capably, actually lives with an abusive husband and is suffering from a serious malignancy. In "The Merry Widow," the titular character, who had silently endured years with an insufferable husband, takes herself on a much-anticipated holiday to attempt living life on her own terms. VERDICT These sharp and poignant stories will have broad appeal but will be especially nostalgic for readers who came of age in the heady dawn of feminism and who cut their literary teeth on the likes of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Drabble herself.-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.