Margaret Drabble and the Sense of Possibility

Abstract

Margaret Drabble's novels are being read — and talked about — increasingly both in England and North America. The talk is predictably varied, even contradictory, in its import. Her work is praised for its fine criticism of contemporary English society and for its sympathetic portrayal of domestic life — love, marriage, and the bearing of children; yet it is also accused of falsifying both these spheres. This essay is written in praise of Drabble's fictions, but I am not primarily interested in how accurately she describes the way we live now (though she often does that very well indeed, there are others who do it better). What does interest me is how accurately, how richly, she renders a particular mood, a particular state of mind. Further, though I am not sure that she would agree with me, I believe that her true strength as a writer is a lyric strength: what happens in her novels is not really the important thing. Indeed in this area her reader must be willing to tolerate a good deal of implausibility — implausible minor characters, implausible plots, and (especially) implausible endings. But if we do tolerate these things, we do so because we know how little they interfere with the essential pleasure of reading Drabble. The following pages are an attempt to define that pleasure, to isolate the special experience her fiction at its best has to offer us.