Margaret Drabble's collection of tales, which span four decades, addresses the demands placed on professional women
This collection of 14 stories, assembled by the Spanish academic José Francisco Fernández, spans four decades of Margaret Drabble's writing career, from 1966 to 2000. As they are arranged chronologically, it's possible to see the same themes resurfacing and evolving across the years. Much of Drabble's short fiction unpicks what is to be a successful and accomplished woman, usually an academic or media personality; a woman of outward composure grappling with the demands of lovers, family, co-workers and her own wayward flesh.In the title story, published in 1973, a woman who prides herself on her efficiency is confronted with the fact that "a little bit of the mechanism in me has broken". Her own body is part of this conspiracy and, as if she can longer hold it all in anymore, she seeps and leaks; the final image of her calmly addressing a room full of people while unseen blood spills from her remains an incredibly potent one
While the earlier stories are tauter and more depersonalised, full of glinting detail, the later ones have a more sweeping, open quality. The protagonists age accordingly as the years pass, while the use of landscape features more prominently in her writing. There's a delicate sense of quest to the final story, the Wordsworth-inspired "Stepping Westward" – written in 1994, though not published until 2000 – in which a teacher treks though the Quantocks in search of something more than just the poetic. While the body remains a mutinous thing, with a tendency to break, there's more of a sense of acceptance of oneself, a feeling of potential energy yet to be spent and wonder at a world that can still surprise.
