Margaret Drabble

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BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR


Title: Garrick Year: Description:
romance

Title: The Peppered Moth: Description:
It is 1905, and Bessie is a small child living in a South Yorkshire mining town. Unusually gifted, she sits quietly and studies hard, waiting for the day when she can sit the Cambridge entrance exam and escape the way of life her ancestors have never even thought to question. At the other end of the century her granddaughter, Faro, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the town where her grandmother grew up and sees the families who have lived there for longer than anyone can remember. But for all her exotic ancestry and glamour, has she really travelled any further than them? Excerpted from The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved Chrissie, in sombre, stylish black, had staked her position in the front pew as First, ost Suffering and Most Enduring Widow. Nick lay there in his coffin, covered in rubbishy wreaths from grieving cast-offs, and she could se the rest of the motley congregation through the red eyes in the back of her proud head. She reached for her daughter in Faro's hand, and clutched it, as the music stopped. She knew that somebody was about to stand up and say something unutterably silly, unforgivably stupid. She felt it in her bones. Faro squeezed her mother's hand in return. We two against the world.The ranks were full. There were Gaulden brothers and sisters, a rackety, impossible, Circean, good-looking, foreign, dissolute crew; none of them had come to much good. Nick hadn't been the one black sheep of the flock. They had been prodigals all. However had Chrissie Barron got herself mixed up with this lot? Nick's father Gyorgy Gaulden had died a decade earlier, but Nick's mother Eva was still alive, and present, and sharply surveying the chaos she had engendered. Was it for this that Eva and Gyorgy had escaped from the death throes of Europe to the safety of Finchley Road? To bring forth this feckless, wastrel, decadent Bohemian host? This ragged army, this forlorn hope?Unfair, unkind, said Chrissie to herself, a she tried to block out the valedictory words of Eric Mendelsson, old schoolmate, old drinking partner and poker player, failed poet, failed scrounger, failed failure. Balliol scholar, chess player, charmer, wit. One of the cleverest men of his generation. Could have been a chess grandmaster, could have been a poet, could have been a man. One of the cleverest, but certainly not one of the best-looking: he had always been a big-nosed freak, and now, in his early sixties, he was a scarecrow. His lazy, lopsided, voluptuous, terrible smile illuminated his carrion face, as he spoke from the pulpit of his old friend Nick's schooldays, of the happy hospitable home of Gyorgy and Eva, of the culture and the music and the poetry of the Gauldens...please god let him not start going on about me, thought Chrissie, but how could he avoid her She had been Nick's first conquest, and how desperately they had loved one another, in those long-ago innocent days. Chrissie and nick had dropped out together, eloped together, and disappeared together from the face of the unknown earth. They had fallen don a volcanic fissure into the molten underworld. Would that they had at that instant been transformed together into a fountain, into a reed, into a tree with interwoven boughs, into a breeze or a bird! They had believed that the violence of their love would burn away mortality, would purify and transfix them into an attitude of everlasting devotion. Chrissie, ho had preserved her chastity through so many assaults in the suburban undergrowth and on the late night train back to Farnleigh from Charing Cross, had abandoned herself without restraint to the embraces and assurances of Nicholas Gaulden, and had run away with him in the fullness of her heart and her youth. And now he lay in a narrow box, waiting to be incinerated. What was left of that bright boy, apart from a trail of devastation?His children, his grandchildren. He had been prolific. Seven known children and two grandchildren could have attended his funeral, had the roll-call been complete, and who knows how many unacknowledged offspring lurked in the wings, or had never known their parentage? Chrissie, even as she listened to Eric praising (and quite wittily, she had to concede) her own early attempts at soup-making, at running a soup-kitchen, in the flat in Barlby Road, could not resist trying to do a headcount of the numbers of Nick's women whom she had already greeted or spotted that day. There was Moira, down-trodden First Mistress whom he had never married, and who bore him two children; then Sarafina, mother of Aurelius; then Fiona, who had, after Chrissie's divorce, for a brief spell become a legal Mrs Gaulden; then Stella, mother of Tiger; and finally Jessica, who was rumoured to have been on the verge of a death-bed shotgun wedding, but who was thought not to have made it. Jessica had drawn the short straw, by common consent. Hers had been the hospitalisation, the rejected transplant, the catheters, the plastic bags, the death rattle. Jessica had never known Nick in his golden days.But Jessica had probably been convinced that Nick had loved her only, her only and her ever. That was his trick. That was how he pulled it. And no doubt he'd still been able to manage it, a sick man in his sixties, in need of a new liver. Still the most handsome man in London, in the eyes of far too many.Whom had she missed? Furtively, Chrissie counted again, on the fingers of the hand that Faro was not clutching. The children: there was Faro, his first-born: Moira's daughters, Iona and Arethusa, who for a long time had lived upstairs: then the boys - Serafina's Aurelius and Stella's Tiger. There were supposed to be two more boys, somewhere, and another woman - where was Jenny, with her boys Sam and Derwent? Or was it Derwent and Sam? Chrissie had never met Jenny Pargiter and her sons, and had been unable to locate her earlier in the proceedings, as the funeral party had loitered in the academic-ecclesiastical re-brick cloisters, making uneasy conversation and trying furtively to read the messages on the bouquets that perspired inelegantly in cellophane wraps. Chrissie had been assured, by Stella, that Jenny Pargiter was there, but she looked in vain for a young mother emblematically accompanied, like a martyr, by two identifying Gaulden sons. Perhaps Jenny Pargiter had come without them? Perhaps she had thought them too young or too ill disciplined for such an outing? .. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Title: Realms Of Gold: Description:
The Realms of Gold is a sophisticated, realistically suspenseful love story about two highly intelligent, successful, complicated people who love, who separate, and who need to return to each other. And it is a novel, as well, about family connection and human heritage in the last twentieth century - how, in the midst of the endless splitting and drifting apart, people yearn to regain their links with family, past and present, and the strengthening revelations of self those links can yield.

Title: The Peppered Moth: Description:
It is 1912 and Bessie Bawtry is a small child living in Breaseborough, a South Yorkshire mining town. Unusually gifted, she sits quietly and studies hard, waiting for the day when she can sit the Cambridge entrance exam. Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance......

Title: The Oxford Companion To English Literature: Description:
Indispensible for the literary minded, invaluable for crossword freaks, the "Companion" is above all a book to be browsed in and enjoyed - The Economist

Title: The Seven Sisters: Description:
When Candida Wilton arrives alone in London, divorced and rejected and without much money, she is filled with a strange sense of excitement. What can happen, at her age, to change her fortunes? How will she adjust to this shabby, violent, yet curiously attractive city? When Candida starts writing her diary, she expects that she will fill it with the small events with which she pads out her empty life, but she has always had a secret belief that despite all she is a lucky person. And she is, in a sense, right, for when an unexpected windfall brings her sudden riches, her horizons broaden: she will start, she thinks, with a trip abroad...

Title: Lady Susan,the Watsons, Sanditon: Description:
These three short works show Austen experimenting with a variety of different literary styles, from melodrama to satire, and exploring a range of social classes and settings. The early epistolary novel LADY SUSAN depicts an unscrupulous coquette, toying with the affections of several men. In contrast, THE WATSONS is a delightful fragment, whose spirited heroine - Emma - finds her marriage opportunities limited by poverty and pride. Meanwhile SANDITON, set in a seaside resort, offers a glorious cast of hypochondriacs and spectators, treated by Austen with both amusement and scepticism.

Title: The Radiant Way: Description:
Twenty five years ago Liz, Alix and Esther were leading lights at Cambridge. Now they meet as old friends at a glittering New Year's Eve party to welcome in the 1980s. It is the dawn of the Thatcher era, and Britain is on the brink of great social and political upheaval. How will these three ambitious and confident middle-aged women survive the personal and professional challenges, and the changing values of the next decade? The Radiant Way brilliantly explores their loves, losses, hopes and fears, and the strength of their friendship.

Title: A Summer Bird-cage: Description:
Two sisters: beautiful, sophisticated Louise and attractive, witty and intelligent Sarah who has always felt left behind. Then Louise marries the wealthy but unappealing novelist Stephen Halifax, and Sarah, recently graduated from Oxford, is thrown back into family affairs. As Louise enters a high-profile world of glamour, parties and gossip columns, Sarah, drifting in London with her degree and new-found freedom, is only allowed glimpses into this new alien life. However, as the cracks begin to show in Louise's marriage and rumours of infidelity spread, Sarah discovers that, beneath her cool exterior, her sister is not quite the person she thought she was.

Title: The Millstone - A Touch Of Love: Description:
At first Rosamund seems to be similar to one of the new women Miss Drabble has already so coolly exposed in The Garrick Year and The Summer Bird-Cage. She is self-confident and self-contained-- but articulate. Devastatingly articulate-- not a word is misplaced. But then the paradox becomes clear which is not only the fascination of her book but its central intention. While Rosamund is all mind (on her way to a University post), she hasn't too much sense; while she's very attractive to men, she's inexperienced and actually averse to sex. Now when she goes to bed, almost by default, with a gentle, diffident homosexual, she becomes Pregnant and is asked to pay ""the Victorian penalty."" For the first time she is ""trapped in a human limit""; and her experiences to follow, from queueing up in a dismal National Health maternity clinic, to having the baby, to learning that Octavia--an enchanting infant--has a congenital defect and may not survive surgery and certainly won't live without it, all of teach Rosamund about a great many other ""human limits."" Some of it however is exceedingly amusing-- certainly the part which deals with Lydia, a casual friend, who moves in on her to exploit her as raw material for a novel which Octavia chews up; a few of their equally enlightened, vagrant friends, etc. Within its limits (feminine, young, modern) it is much more than just another L-Shaped Room off The Apartment. It's a funny, touching, and very classy thinking girl's entertainment.

Title: The Needle's Eye: Description:
London: Book Club, 1973. Margaret Drabble's novel about barrister, Simon Cavendish, and his involvement with Rose Vassiliou, a woman of remarkable integrity, into whose affairs he is drawn when her husband takes legal action over the costody of their children.