Top novelist feels pressure to 'dumb down'
By Arifa Akbar, arts correspondent writing in The Independent, Tuesday, 7 October 2008

Margaret Drabble, one of Britain's leading novelists and biographers, believes her publishers are pushing her to "dumb down" her work to appeal to a larger readership.

At a meeting of alumni in her old Cambridge University college, Newnham, Dame Margaret suggested that she felt pressure from Penguin, to "rebrand" her fiction, The Independent has been told. At the discussion, alongside the novelist Sarah Dunant, she said: "I have had a weird feeling that I'm being dumbed down by my publishers and it's interesting there's an agenda of how it should be in the marketplace."
Dame Margaret, 69, who takes over as chair of The Society of Authors, added: "I'm amazed they are even trying it on."

Few would doubt Dame Margaret's position in today's literary firmament. In a career spanning more than 40 years, she has written 17 novels and seven works of non-fiction as well as earning a CBE. Dame Margaret, who turned up to discuss the state of literary culture with Ms Dunant, revealed to Ms Dunant she had had a tense conversation with her publishers: "She [Dame Margaret] ... expressed the view that her publishers wanted to remarket her in some way, that there was some need not to let the work just stand on its own.

Read the full piece from The Independent online.