Margaret Drabble | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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After a brief career as an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company Margaret Drabble DBE became a full-time writer, and has written many acclaimed novels. She has also written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and edited the fifth and sixth editions of the Oxford Companion to English Literature.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [49] 19; [59] 38; [66] 7; [71] 19; [77] 16

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The Girl from Apex City

Margaret Drabble on Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) is one of the most sparkling and enjoyable novels I have ever read, and I’ve read it now several times. Each time it manages to surprise and delight me. I put it in a class with Pride and Prejudice, as a book that offers endlessly renewable pleasure. That’s high praise, but I mean every word of it.

A Down-to-Earth Visionary

Margaret Drabble on Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City

I read Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City in 1969, when it was published, and I have a hardback first edition of it, still in its original dust wrapper. When I rediscovered my copy and reread it in the autumn of 2019, to prepare for a seminar at the University of East Anglia to celebrate her centenary, I found that I had been using a bus ticket as a bookmark. I must have been reading it on the No. 24 bus, on my way to or from South End Green in Hampstead. I had forgotten what London bus tickets looked like. The printing was a pale mauve. I couldn’t read that volume on a bus now. It is far too heavy. I can hardly read it in bed.

Underwater Heaven

Margaret Drabble on Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

I can’t remember what age I was when I came across Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies. I must have read it earlier than my other childhood favourite, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, which was a Christmas gift in 1948, but at that age I can’t have tackled the Kingsley tale in its full version. I must have read a shortened illustrated children’s text, of which there have been many. I loved the story of Tom’s adventures, first as a dirty chimney-sweep intruding on little Ellie in her fine white bedchamber, then when he went on the run through a landscape that strangely mixes Yorkshire and Devon, then as a water-baby, as he ventures down the rivers and into the sea. I sympathized with his loneliness and with his longing to find other water-babies, and rejoiced with him when he discovered that the sea was full of them.

Episode 17: Margaret Drabble: A Writer’s Life

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Dame Margaret Drabble joins us at the Slightly Foxed table as we celebrate her life in writing. From taking up her pen in the 1960s as a young mother alone in her kitchen to feeling part of a movement with Nell Dunn, Margaret Forster and Edna O’Brien, to editing The Oxford Companion to English Literature without the help of a computer and eschewing the Booker Prize, Margaret Drabble sees writing as both an illness and a trade, finding black humour in ageing and joy in jigsaw puzzles along the way. And we uncover whatever happened to the elusive novelist Elizabeth Jenkins in this month’s reading from the magazine’s archives.

Trollope’s Ireland

Margaret Drabble on the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope

I have been reading Trollope’s fiction over several decades, but it was not until this year that I embarked upon his three principal Irish novels. They have not been his most popular works, and I, like many others, was deterred by the heavy use of dialect which slows the reader down and makes the page look unwelcoming. But when I decided to overcome this prejudice, I was rewarded.

Joyce to the Life

Margaret Drabble on Richard Ellman, James Joyce

I have the clearest recollection of my first reading of Richard Ellmann’s life of James Joyce. I have just reread it, from cover to cover and from footnote to footnote, for the second time. And, at the end, I have found myself, as I did thirty-five years before, with tears in my eyes.

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