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Liz, Alix and Esther were best friends. They knew each other better than they knew themselves. Each of them led charmed lives. They were lucky, and it was good to know they had each other when that luck began to run out. A new novel by an acclaimed author.
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield, England, in 1939, and studied English at Cambridge University. Her novels include The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, The Gates of Ivory, The Witch of Exmoor, The Peppered Moth, and, most recently, The Seven Sisters. Among her non-fiction works are Arnold Bennett: A Biography, A Writer's Britain, and Angus Wilson: A Biography. She is also the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Margaret Drabble has three children and is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd. She lives in London, England.
Her variations in narrative structure and her injection of political and social commentary into her works makes Drabble a particularly challenging and interesting writer. Her return to fiction after a seven-year gap, 1987's The Radiant Way, became a trilogy (completed by A Natural Curiosity and Gates of Ivory) that veered slightly into international adventure territory. Ivory, for example, flips between psychiatrist Liz Headleand (one of the three women first featured in The Radiant Way) and the writer friend for whom she is searching, a man who has gone to Cambodia for research. Unfortunately, several of Drabble's early and highly praised novels (including the first two books of the aforementioned trilogy) are out of print in the U.S. It's a shame, because those books are the ones that established Drabble as an important writer, and are the templates for Drabble's independent, intelligent heroines on the road to self-discovery.
A few critics who have been admirers of Drabble's since she began writing in the 1960s have gone sour on the author in her later years. On the release of The Witches of Exmoor, a Toronto Sun critic wrote, "I am so sad and sorry to report that Margaret Drabble, once one of the best novelists on earth, is past her best," calling the novel a "rehash." Of 2002's The Seven Sisters, the story of middle-aged divorcee Candida Wilton's experiences as a newly single woman, a critic for Britain's Observer lamented the book's unconventional and somewhat cagey approach toward the end. "Altogether, Candida is alive enough that the novel's truncations ache like phantom limbs," the critic wrote. "The realised heroines of Drabble's magnificent books from the 1960s or 1970s would say to Candida, Tell me what it is like to be you."
Ultimately, part of the push and shove over Drabble's work comes down to a tension between literary invention and reader satisfaction; she has often been criticized for not caring enough about her characters to make them engaging. The New York Times wrote of The Gates of Ivory, "It's about politics and literature, terrorism and atrocities, love and life and death.... But ideas do not make a novel. Characters do. And we need to care about them, deeply." However, consider The Nation's take: "What I love about this novel is what I love about the best of Drabble's works -- it's rich and complex and allusive and textured and intertextual and takes on the big questions: life and art, representation and responsibility, the possibility of political action, the question of human nature. It's a novel of ideas at a time when most fiction seems deliberately lobotomized."
Drabble was an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company after she graduated from college, and was an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave; she married fellow RSC actor Clive Swift in 1960. The two divorced in 1975, and Drabble later married biographer Michael Holroyd.
Also a scholarly writer of biography and nonfiction, Drabble has written several forewords to editions of Jane Austen's work as well as lives of novelists Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. The nonfiction includes a 1990 analysis and critique of property law, Safe as Houses.
Drabble has also written several plays including Laura, Isadora, and Bird of Paradise. She adapted her novel The Millstone as the 1969 film A Touch of Love.
Anonymous
Posted April 27, 2002
Margaret Drabble's The Radiant Way is a novel of rich variety. Even after ten years have passed since I first read it, I still want to pick it up and start reading it. With a Dickensian cast of characters and a provocative insight--however pessimistic--into our times, Drabble presents a novel, her tenth, that requires thought and causes wonder. Consider the first three sentences of the novel: 'New Year's Eve, and the end of a decade. A portentous moment, for those who pay attention to portents. Guests were invited for nine.' Juxtaposing the individual and the societal, the domestic and the historical in this emphatic position, Drabble provides an appropriate clue to reading and understanding the multiplicity contained in her tour de force. First and foremost, The Radiant Way is the story of three friends: Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen, and Esther Breuer, who met at Cambridge in 1952. The narrative spans five years, from the 1980 New Year's Eve party at Liz's home that opens the novel to their 1985 get-together on Esther's birthday. Drabble regards their fate as exemplary because they were in the mold of the hardworking people, coming out of a disadvantaged background, who could use education as a vehicle to achieving success and mobility. Indeed, the novel, at points, argues aptly the value of education. For education opens the doors of opportunity. The representative status with which Drabble endows the three women obliges us to consider the question, What is the extent to which the elite, privileged education these three women have acquired helped them to achieve and to realize expectations? Liz Headleand is a classic example of upward social mobility. Since Liz is the most well-off, her life is virtually devoid of financial worries. She studied her way out of the 'prison kitchen' of her youth on Abercorn Avenue to a Cambridge education--truly believing that hard work pays off. She became a respected psychotherapist. She married twice, and Drabble appropriately emphasizes her life with her second husband, the high-powered Charles Headleand, whom she tags as the 'archetypal boss.' Drabble's treatment of the 'high-powered' Charles is relentlessly critical throughout the novel. Though they enjoyed a chic modern marriage together for twenty years, it is about to collapse when the novel opens. We enter into Liz's inner life as she tries to come to grips with this new development. We are brought closest to Liz's internal processes as she also tries to make sense of other things in her life. The aspects of Liz's self and how she copes with the stressing events in her life are emphasized. Not so with the other two, especially Alix. Alix also married twice, but she lost her first husband in a tragic accident. Alix Bowen became a social worker and teacher of literature. She is a wonderfully kind and sympathetic person, who elicits the reader's sympathy by virtue of her bad luck. Money worries insistently plague the happy marriage of Alix and Brian Bowen. Drabble suggests, however, that the Bowen's straitened circumstances owe less to ill-luck and more to an unfavorable society. The spiritual dimension of their marriage fares finely even though material wealth does not keep step with their desires. Brian, whom we see politically entangled wherever he is, whether at the Adult Education Institute or at his new post in a community program, lives his socialism. Alix, in short, is a paradox. That Alix, despite her privileged education, has not become affluent puzzles her and even brings her to despair. Drabble does weave in the explanation of this paradox and, in so doing, she criticizes a politically divided nation, a nation of warring factions in a terminal struggle. For it is the national disarray, to a considerable extent, that accounts for Alix's difficulties and frustration. Esther never marries and remains a true scholar, whose great interest is the Italian R
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Overview
NEWSWEEK
Liz, Alix and Ester have been part of one another's lives since their Cambridge days twenty-five years ago. Liz is a successful psychotherapist, Alix is a wife and mother, still pursuing politics, and Esther is an academic. As we follow them through the next five years we see their world changing around them, and we see each woman ...