Margaret Drabble talks about a lifetime of enmity with her sister, the writer A S Byatt, and of the joy derived from her new short stories.
Walks and puzzles: Margaret Drabble at her home in Porlock, where she takes long treks Photo: ANDREW CROWLEY
'What colour would you expect a writer’s house to be?” asks Dame Margaret Drabble. Perhaps it’s the name… Drabble… drab… or her heavyweight reputation as the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature that makes me expect an interior of puritan cream. Her Quaker background – she was at school, The Mount in York, with Judi Dench – also suggests a self-effacing personality, so the first shock at the house in Somerset where she writes (her husband, the biographer Sir Michael Holroyd prefers London) is to find a kitchen that’s tomato soup red, giving on to a hall of Chinese imperial yellow.
The second surprise is that Drabble is relaxed and chatty, Maggie rather than Margaret. The long-running non-speaks with her elder sister Sue – better known as the novelist A S Byatt or Dame Antonia Duffy – suggest a difficult woman, easy to offend. But we are both laughing as she tells the story of a humiliating recent restaurant dinner with her friend, Nell Dunn, who wrote Up the Junction and Poor Cow. Over dinner, the Italian waiter told Dunn, who has fine cheekbones and wispy blonde hair, that she looked like a writer. “My friend is a writer too,” said Dunn, gesturing towards Drabble, with her severe, practical haircut. “She looks like a housewife,” replied the waiter.
For a woman prone to depression that crushing remark could have started a glum train of thought, but she tells the story with amusement. Drabble’s cheerful mood may be linked to the rush of approval that has greeted the publication of A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, her collected short stories. Written between 1966 and 2000, and stuffed into a box file until an editor urged her to let him publish them, the stories offer a crash course in the acerbic delights of a writer who, like a character in one of her stories, has spent “anxious and enjoyable hours trying to disentangle and isolate her various emotions, and to assess their respective values.”
Her characters, mostly women, have pleasant smiley outsides but rich inner lives of memory and fantasy, fury and elation. The 13 stories are linked, she says, not by theme but by development over time: “The early ones are young and nervous. Then quite aggressive. Then more reconciled to getting older.” That, in brief, is the story of her own 72 years.
Full story in The Telegraph.
Her characters, mostly women, have pleasant smiley outsides but rich inner lives of memory and fantasy, fury and elation. The 13 stories are linked, she says, not by theme but by development over time: “The early ones are young and nervous. Then quite aggressive. Then more reconciled to getting older.” That, in brief, is the story of her own 72 years.
Full story in The Telegraph.
