Written in 1962, this book takes us back to the beginning of the era when women were starting to push back against the assumption that, even if they went to college, they would marry and have kids right after. Sarah, our narrator, is a bit surprised that her older sister, the stunningly beautiful...
Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone begins with an introduction into the mindset of the narrator Rosamund, a scholar focusing on her PhD in Elizabethan sonnet sequences while living in her middle class parents flat in England. In the beginning, Rosamund carefully explains her previous reservations a...
There are a few interesting commentaries here about social class, family relationships, and especially the squabbling that goes on over inheritance. BUT in general I thought it was boring, lacking in suspense, and in need of a good editor.First, there are several points in which Drabble contradi...
I've always liked Margaret Drabble's work more than that of her (more successful?) sister, A.S. Byatt. This may be just a residual consequence of having "met" her while I was in college. She had been invited to lecture by someone in the English department, and at the time I used to hang out with ...
After reading the first third of this book, I was left feeling quite angry and patronised about a narrative fictional account of working class life in South Yorkshire, England. As Yorkshire (and South Yorkshire itself) is my birthplace and former neck of the woods, I felt angry that lives, be the...
A very strange book, consisting of two separate parts which really didn't seem to go together at all. In the first part, the ghost of the Red Queen tells her story from the afterlife. The manner of the telling is disjointed, but the style fits the subject matter: the queen, or “Lady Hong”, is tr...