Margaret Drabble’s The Realms of Gold, ‘its lines were the lines of memory’

Abstract

From her first to her sixth novel, Margaret Drabble’s characters have sporadically worried about their pasts, even though the plots of the novels required no confrontation with it. In A Summer Bird-Cage, Louise tells Sarah, her sister and the protagonist of the novel, ‘Whatever happens… you can’t buy the past. You can’t buy an ancestry and a history. You have your own past, and the free will to deal with it, and that’s all’, and Rose Vassiliou in The Needle’s Eye is distressed by ‘the callousness with which one discarded one’s past self, the alacrity with which one embraced the wisdom of the present. Looking back upon one’s past, one could disown it, with knowledge, experience, and judgement all augmented: but what if one had once been right and ceased to be so?’1 However, it was not until The Realms of Gold, her seventh and perhaps most successful novel, that Margaret Drabble set herself and her protagonist, Frances 011erenshaw Wingate, the task of coming to terms with the past, both personally and culturally.KeywordsAnorexia NervosaHotel RoomLost CityFollow Breast SurgerySpanish ConquistadorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.