The love of place is endemic in English literature, from the work of the earliest poets and hermits to the suburban celebrations of John Betjeman, covering all varieties of the…

This book draws together the different aspects of Margaret Drabble’s narrative practice, and looks at the increasing flexibility of her narrative methods, both in terms of the kind of narrator…

Humphrey and Ailsa meet as children by a grey, northern sea. Humphrey is quiet, serious - and will in time explore the sea’s mysteries; Ailsa is angry, a freckled cobra…

The first new novel in five years from one of the most versatile and accomplished writers of her generation (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker )

It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show…

This title argues that while Drabble (the author of ‘The Waterfall’, ‘A Natural Curiosity’, ‘Jerusalem the Golden’) rejects psychoanalysis as a waste of time, her fatalist vision of how childhood…

Simon Camish is an embittered, timid barrister, too busy with his own problems to take note of Rose Vassiliou across a dinner party table. But only a few years before…

This book examines Margaret Drabble’s female Bildungsromane using a Marxist-feminist theoretical model. Thus it historicizes genre - the Bildungsroman - and also the specific kinds of journeys upon which the…