The Development of Writing Techniques in M. Drabble's Works Focusing on The Waterfall (1969) and The Seven Sisters (2002)

Abstract

The English writer, Margaret Drabble, published her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, in 1963. Most of her early novels are simple and are written in a traditional manner. In her early days, she expressed negative opinions about experimental novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and boasted of being a traditionalist. However, as her career as a novelist deepened, her methods of writing gradually changed. Despite her early conservative alignment, she eventually used progressive writing techniques in her fifth novel, The Waterfall, on the theme of adultery and its consequences. Drabble says the use of narrative techniques was necessary to depict the protagonist's deep psychology during her suffering. We can judge it to be moderately experimental. About 35 years after The Waterfall, The Seven Sisters was published. Her writing technique had greatly progressed by then. The novel consists of four parts, but she switches the narration throughout, utilising the framework of Virgil's Aeneid, as a result of which the construction is highly complicated. Drabble in her early period is said to have been a writer whose novels were simple and based on daily matters. However, Drabble's contemporary work resembles very closely the kind of experimental novel she once opposed.