The Millstone by Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble - The Guardian, Saturday 19 March 2011

Margaret Drabble at her home. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The Millstone was my third novel and I wrote it while I was expecting my third baby. Its subject, not surprisingly, is maternity. There weren't many novels about maternity in those days, but I don't think I had any sense of entering forbidden or dangerous ground. I was writing about what was all around me, the daily lives of myself and my friends, the struggle to work and bring up children at the same time. Those were the days of the Guardian women's page, under the legendary Mary Stott, when it was a forum for discussions about play groups and separation anxiety, breastfeeding and vaccination and other less womanly topics. I used to write for it occasionally, and knew there was a companionable readership out there, although I was often lonely at home, as young mothers are.

I wrote novels to keep myself company, and with my first book had discovered an informal first-person narrative voice that took me by surprise. It seemed to arrive from nowhere, and I stayed with it for my first three books. I had liberated myself from the neutral critical prose of the university essay (which I had greatly enjoyed writing) and found a new way of exploring the non-literary world. The protagonist of The Millstone is an aspiring academic, and part of me wished I had become one too, but she is more concerned with her illegitimate baby than with finishing her thesis. I don't know how consciously I isolated her experience of motherhood by making her an unmarried mother, which obviated the necessity of dealing either with marriage or with a male father figure. I must have had reasons for this, but am still not sure what they were. It wasn't a literary decision.

The illness of the child sprang directly from personal experience. One of my children had been diagnosed with a heart lesion, or hole in the heart, and Rosamund's anxieties were very much my own. She was braver than I, but I did have a sense of writing on behalf of many mothers as she confronted hospital authority. I dramatised my predicament, as writers do, but I didn't think that dishonest. The issue was real, and I think my treatment of it was useful. I didn't realise until many years later that some of the medical details I invented were way off the mark. I would do that differently now, and the story would be more painful.

In terms of the literary history, I was becoming aware in the 1960s that the woman's novel, always strong in England, was moving in new directions, driven by a changing educational system and changing opportunities. The courtship novel of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen was giving way to the post-courtship novel of marital conflict and professional ambitions. Feminist criticism was slowly bringing our attention to the fact that nearly all the great women writers of the past were childless. Elizabeth Gaskell, or Mrs Gaskell as we called her, was an exception, and so was the undervalued Mary Shelley. (We never called her Mrs Shelley.) My contemporaries and I were working in a strong female tradition, but in an age of double values and contradictory expectations, and you can see the stress in Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, Edna O'Brien and Nell Dunn, whose work I was discovering at this time – though I hadn't read any of them when I first embarked on writing fiction. My living role models then were Angus Wilson and Saul Bellow.
I wasn't thinking about literary history when I wrote The Millstone. I was writing to exorcise fear, I was writing for luck, I was writing in hope. There are bits of the novel I regret, moments of unwitting snobbery and self-conscious smartness. But Rosamund was what she was, she was of her age, caught at the opening of an era that she didn't know how to enter – on the border between the one-night stand of the ignorant virgin and the one-night stand of Bridget Jones. The sexual ignorance of the young in those days was remarkable. So was the sexual ignorance of the old. My publisher's reader (a man, and middle aged) queried the plot, on the grounds that it was almost impossible to get pregnant during the first act of intercourse.


After The Millstone, I stopped writing first-person novels. I came to think it a lazy form, and embarked on more complex and ambitious polyphonic efforts. I sometimes wish I could recapture that easy single linear narrative, and in The Seven Sisters in 2002 I tried to do so, but felt mysteriously compelled to mess it up with a bit of modish postmodernism. Modish postmodernism was easy. It's the straight true line that's hard.