Download or read book The Plays of Margaret Drabble written by José Francisco Fernández and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-11 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning British novelist Margaret Drabble is renowned for her fiction, stories that gave voice to the new woman of the 1960s and continue to illuminate the conflicting roles of women in the twenty-first century. Drabble’s long affiliation with the theatrical world also inspired her to experiment with the dramatic form. She wrote two plays—one for television, Laura (1964), and one for the stage, Bird of Paradise (1969). Fernández’s penetrating new critical edition makes both plays available for the first time, giving Drabble fans a new vantage point from which to understand her work. In Laura and Bird of Paradise, Drabble mines the familiar territory of social class, domestic life, and questions of destiny, which have been the hallmark of her writing. Asin her novels, both plays reveal a deep curiosity about the world and a piercing commentary on the social issues of her time. The volume’s introduction and accompanying critical essays give valuable insight into the plays’ historical and social context, and explore the artistic solutions that an accomplished author of fiction found when writing for the stage. Offering a fascinating complement to Drabble’s prodigious oeuvre, this volume also provides a glimpse into a specific period in English letters, one that shaped an influential generation of writers.

Download or read book The Millstone written by Margaret Drabble and published by HMH. This book was released on 1998-10-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of an upper-middle-class unwed mother in 1960s London, from a novelist who is “often as meticulous as Jane Austen and as deadly as Evelyn Waugh” (Los Angeles Times). In a newly swinging London, Rosamund Stacey indulges in a premarital sexual encounter—and soon thereafter finds herself pregnant. Despite her fierce independence and academic brilliance, Rosamund is in fact naïve and unworldly, and the choices before her are terrifying. But in the perfection and helplessness of her baby she finds an unconditional love she has never known before—and as she navigates a situation still considered scandalous in her circles, she may discover that motherhood and independence need not be mutually exclusive. From “one of Britain’s most dazzling writers,” the award-winning author of The Dark Flood Rises, The Millstone captures both a moment in history when women’s lives were changing dramatically and the timeless truths of the female experience (The New York Times Book Review).

Download or read book The Radiant Way written by Margaret Drabble and published by Allied Publishers. This book was released on 1988 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel goes back through the lives of three women, a psychoanalyst, an art historian and a good woman who all met at Cambridge in the 1950s.

Download or read book The Garrick Year written by Margaret Drabble and published by HMH. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Golden PEN Award–winning author: A “well-written, entertaining” dark comedy of a marriage on the rocks in 1960s London (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times). Emma and David Evans seem to have a perfect life. He’s a handsome and successful Welsh actor; she’s a sometimes model, soon-to-be television news anchor, and full-time mother. But all is not well under the surface. She’s impatient and choked by domesticity; he’s narcissistic and unfaithful. Between the two of them is a privately combative marriage that has fed their want of drama. Then David relocates the family from their London home to provincial Hereford, where he’s to star in two plays during the city’s festival season. It’s here, far removed from the highbrow stimulation of the city, that Emma’s resentment of David—his long hours, his expectations, his ego—finally boils over. Bored and lonely, she falls into the arms of the theater’s director, an indiscretion that triggers a series of surprises neither Emma nor David could have foreseen. Narrated by a complicated, fascinating, and fiercely intelligent woman at the end of her rope, The Garrick Year is “a witty, beautiful novel . . . written with extraordinary art” (The New York Times). “[A] romantic novel about actors and the theatre and marriage and sex and babies . . . deliciously bitter . . . so alive.” —The New Yorker “Unsparing . . . a very knowing, diverting entertainment.” —Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book The Dark Flood Rises written by Margaret Drabble and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 around the country for her job with a housing charity 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. This triumphant, bravura novel takes in love, death, sun-drenched islands, poetry, Maria Callas, tidal waves, surprise endings - and new beginnings.

Download or read book The Pattern in the Carpet written by Margaret Drabble and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author offers an innovative mix of memoir, jigsaw-puzzle history, and the strange delights of puzzling, with sketches of her family members and her thoughts on the importance of childhood play, art, and writing.

Download or read book The Seven Sisters written by Margaret Drabble and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Englishwoman at a crossroads in her life takes an unexpected path in this “teasingly clever new novel” by the author of The Millstone (Publisher Weekly). Candida Wilton—a woman recently betrayed, rejected, divorced, and alienated from her three grown daughters—moves from a beautiful Georgian house in lovely Suffolk to a two-room walk-up flat in a run-down building in central London. The move, however, is not a financial necessity. She herself wonders if she’s putting herself through a survival test…or perhaps a punishment. How will Candida adjust to this shabby, menacing, but curiously appealing city? What can happen, at her age, to change her life? There is a relationship with a computer to which she now confides her past and her present. An adult-ed class on Virgil offers friendships of sorts with other women—widows, divorced, never married, women straddled between generations. And then comes Candida's surprise inheritance, and the surprising things she chooses to do with it…

Download or read book The Sea Lady written by Margaret Drabble and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2008-05-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman, who spent a summer together as children in Ornemouth, a town by the gray North Sea. As they journey back to Ornemouth to receive honorary degrees from a new university there—Humphrey on the train, Ailsa flying—they take stock of their lives over the past thirty years, their careers, and their shared personal entanglements. Humphrey is a successful marine biologist, happiest under water, but now retired; Ailsa, scholar and feminist, is celebrated for her pioneering studies of gender and for her gift for lucid and dramatic exposition. The memories of their lives unfold as Margaret Drabble exquisitely details the social life in England in the second half of the last century.

Download or read book The Peppered Moth written by Margaret Drabble and published by HMH. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prize-winning author of The Dark Flood Rises offers an “absorbing” portrait of three generations of women—inspired by her own family (The New York Times Book Review). In the early 1900s, young Bessie Bawtry grows up in a mining town in South Yorkshire, England. Unusually gifted, she longs to escape a life burdened by unquestioned tradition. She studies patiently, dreaming of the day when she will take the entrance exam for Cambridge and leave her narrow world. A generation later, Bessie’s daughter Chrissie feels a similar impulse to expand her horizons, which she in turn passes on to her own daughter. Nearly a century after that, Bessie’s granddaughter finds herself listening to a lecture on genetics and biological determinism. She has returned to Breaseborough and wonders at the families who remained in the humble little town where Bessie grew up. Confronted with what would have been her life had her grandmother stayed, she finds herself faced with difficult questions. Is she really so different from the plain South Yorkshire locals? As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself—not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be nearing extinction but is now enjoying a sudden and unexplained resurgence. With The Peppered Moth, the acclaimed author of The Seven Sisters conjures a captivating work of semi-fiction, grappling with her memory of her own mother and the indelible mark of family and heredity.

Download or read book The Witch of Exmoor written by Margaret Drabble and published by HMH. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year: “Part social satire, part thriller, and entirely clever” (Elle). It is a midsummer’s evening in the English countryside, and the three grown Palmer children are coming to the end of an enjoyable meal in the company of their partners and offspring. From this pleasant vantage point they play a dinner-party game: What kind of society would you be willing to accept if you didn’t know your place in it? But the abstract question of justice, like all their family conversations, is eventually brought back to the more pressing problem of their eccentric mother, Frieda, the famous writer, who has abandoned them and her old life, and gone to live alone in Exmoor. Frieda has always been a powerful and puzzling figure, a monster mother with a mysterious past. What is she plotting against them now? Has some inconvenient form of political correctness led her to favor her enchanting half-Guyanese grandson? What will she do with her money? Is she really writing her memoirs? And why has she disappeared? Has the dark spirit of Exmoor finally driven her mad? The Witch of Exmoor brilliantly interweaves high comedy and personal tragedy, unraveling the story of a family whose comfortable, rational lives, both public and private, are about to be violently disrupted by a succession of sinister, messy events. “Leisurely and mischievous,” it is a dazzling, wickedly gothic tale of a British matriarch, her three grasping children, and the perils of self-absorption (The New Yorker). “As meticulous as Jane Austen, as deadly as Evelyn Waugh.” —Los Angeles Times

Download or read book A summer bird cage written by Margaret Drabble and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Red Queen written by Margaret Drabble and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2005-10-03 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara Halliwell, on a grant at Oxford, receives an unexpected package-a centuries-old memoir by a Korean crown princess. An appropriate gift indeed for her impending trip to Seoul, but Barbara doesn't know who sent it. On the plane, she avidly reads the memoir, a story of great intrigue as well as tragedy. The Crown Princess Hyegyong recounts in extraordinary detail the ways of the Korean court and confesses the family dramas that left her childless and her husband dead by his own hand. When a Korean man Barbara meets at her hotel offers to guide her to some of the haunts of the crown princess, Barbara tours the royal courts and develops a strong affinity for everything related to the princess and her mysterious life. Barbara's time in Korea goes quickly, but captivated by her experience and wanting to know more about the princess, she wonders if her life can ever be the way it was before.

Download or read book These Possible Lives written by Fleur Jaeggy and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brief in the way a razor’s slice is brief, remarkable essays by a peerless stylist New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy’s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb “spoke of ‘Lilliputian rabbits’ when eating frog fricassse”; Henry Fuseli “ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams”; “Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers”; and “Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.” In a book of “blue devils” and night visions, the Keats essay opens: “In 1803, the guillotine was a common child’s toy.” And poor Schwob’s end comes as he feels “like a ‘dog cut open alive’”: “His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.” Fleur Jaeggy’s essays—or are they prose poems?—smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire.

Download or read book The Oxford Companion to English Literature written by Sir Paul Harvey and published by . This book was released on 1932 with total page 888 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Writer s Britain written by Margaret Drabble and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 1979 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selections from England's great writers, describing various sites and scenes, are accompanied by commentary on how those writers have affected our tastes

Download or read book The Realms of Gold written by Margaret Drabble and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drabble strikes gold with this novel about a famous archaeologist who is passionately in love with a married, slightly mad and very moral man. Alive with feeling and intelligence, endearing characters and feminist insights, this is one of the very best by an immensely gifted author.

Download or read book The Golden Notebook written by Doris Lessing and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2008-10-14 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.