Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble was born on 5 June 1939 in Sheffield, and she attended Sheffield High School for Girls before going on to Newnham College, Cambridge, for her university education. A citizen of the United Kingdom writing in English, she built a career of considerable range, working as a novelist, biographer, literary critic, editor, screenwriter, playwright, and short story writer — a combination that established her as one of the more versatile prose writers in British letters.
Her work earned recognition across several distinct bodies of writing. She received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, two awards in British literary culture. The E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award extended that recognition further. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Across her career, Drabble produced work in fiction, biography, criticism, drama, and short fiction, sustaining a literary output across multiple forms and over many decades. Her prizes and appointments accumulated over time rather than arriving in a concentrated burst, reflecting continued engagement with writing in several modes. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a formal recognition that marked the body of work she produced throughout her professional life.
Quotes by Margaret Drabble
I actually remember feeling delight, at two o’clock in the morning, when the baby woke for his feed, because I so longed to have another look at him.
Doing a jigsaw was not an intelligence test, or a personality assesment programme; it was a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation and imitation and discovery and reverie.
Maybe the human species has evolved too far, maybe we all move around too much, too pointlessly, and consciousness will implode upon itself.
Mid-life crises, in Fran’s ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises.
One wouldn’t want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment.
Learning was so dangerous: for how could one tell in advance, while still ignorant, whether a thing could ever be unlearned or forgotten, or if, once known and named, it would invalidate by its significance the whole of one’s former life, all of those years wiped out, convicted at one blow, retrospectively darkened by one sudden light?
I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep: I wanted him in my bed all night, asleep on my pillow, and I might have had him, but I said nothing.
What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering – that you’re supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn’t have bothered to write them.
And there isn’t any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn’t seem to be any moral place for flesh.