Drabble, Margaret – The Bell Bookshop

Margaret Drabble on the Romantics

Emma — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

‘Thames & Hudson’s new, affordable, covetable ‘Pocket Perspectives’: beautifully illustrated essays by canonical writers’ Financial Times

A highly acclaimed exploration of the way in which the landscape has both influenced and been represented in British Romantic literature.

Margaret Drabble on the Romantics presents an image of Britain as seen through the eyes of some of its most celebrated authors. Many of the Romantics, as well as their successors, are closely associated with particular landscapes – the Wordsworths with the Lake District, Walter Scott with the Scottish Borders, the BrontÃ« sisters with West Yorkshire. Margaret Drabble deepens our understanding of this connection, unpacking the Romantics’ fascination with all varieties of rural landscape, from roaring seas to tranquil villages, while also exploring their writing’s subtler associations.

Herself a star in the literary firmament, Drabble illuminates how this love of place fashioned some of the Romantics’ greatest works. She considers the resonances of myth and legend, art and earlier literature that the Romantics found in places such as North Wales and Cornwall and investigates how their writing has, in turn, shaped our visual attitudes, taste in landscape and relation to nature.

A Summer Bird-Cage

Emma — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In her witty, masterful debut novel, Margaret Drabble conjures a gripping story of sibling rivalry. Louise, beautiful and sophisticated, marries wealthy novelist Stephen Fairfax. Sarah, recently graduated from Oxford, is thrown back into family matters. Louise’s life becomes one of parties, gossip columns and glamour. Sarah, now in London, begins to discover a newfound freedom, only glimpsing her sister’s fashionable life. But as rumours of infidelity in Louise’s marriage surface, Sarah finds that her sister, beneath her cool exterior, may not be the woman she thought she was.

‘Margaret Drabble’s early novels were intimate and sprightly chronicles of the small dissatisfactions and small triumphs of young women like herself’ – Hilary Mantel

The Millstone

Emma — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The Millstone is a radical celebration of the mother-child relationship. It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one-night stand. Although single parenthood is still not socially acceptable, she chooses to have the baby rather than to seek an illegal abortion, and finds her life transformed by motherhood.

‘Rosamund is marvellous, a true Drabble heroine’ – Sunday Times

The Peppered Moth

Emma — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

One hot summer afternoon in South Yorkshire, Faro sits at a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has travelled from London to the Northern mining town where generations of her family have lived and worked, to explore her own past. Decades before, in the early twentieth century, Bessie Bawtry also ponders her place in the world. A child of unusual determination and precocious intelligence, she longs for the day she will eventually escape the working-class life her ancestor would never have dreamt of leaving.

The Peppered Moth explores the way we are shaped by our environment and ancestry, told with elegant prose, wry humour and captivating storytelling, through the story of one family across generations through the twentieth century.

‘Margaret Drabble is writing, not about an individual, but about a generation, or two, or more – of women . . . This is a sad tale, tenderly told, embedded in a robust family chronicle’ – Doris Lessing

The needle’s eye

Emma — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Simon Camish, a resentful insecure barrister in a stifling marriage, would not have particularly noticed Rose Vassiliou had he not been asked to drive her home one night after a dinner party. Now, separated from her Greek husband, Rose lives alone with her three children. Despite all the efforts and sneers of her friends, she refuses to move from her crumbling house in a decaying neighbourhood to which she has become attached. Gradually drawn further and further into her affairs, Simon becomes aware that Rose is a woman of remarkable integrity and courage.

‘Though I have admired Miss Drabble’s writing for years, I will admit that nothing she has written in the past quite prepared me for the depth and richness of this book’ – Joyce Carol Oates

The Dark Flood Rises

Emma — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017: ‘masterly’
GUARDIAN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: ‘An absolute tour de force’

Fran may be old but she’s not going without a fight. So she dyes her hair, enjoys every glass of red wine, drives restlessly around the country and lives in an insalubrious tower block that her loved ones disapprove of. And as each of them – her pampered ex Claude, old friend Jo, flamboyant son Christopher and earnest daughter Poppet – seeks happiness in their own way, what will the last reckoning be? Will they be waving or drowning when the end comes? By turns joyous and profound, darkly sardonic and moving, The Dark Flood Rises questions what makes a good life, and a good death.