Drabble, Margaret 1939-
English novelist

Born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, she was educated at the Mount School, York (the Quaker boarding school where her mother taught), and Newnham College, Cambridge. She acted for a short time, then turned to writing. Divorced from her first husband, the actor Clive Swift, in 1972 (after having three children), she married Michael Holroyd in 1982. Frequently mirroring her own life, her novels concentrate on the concerns of intelligent, often frustrated middle-class women. A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), The Garrick Year (1964), The Millstone (1965), Jersualem the Golden (1967), The Needle's Eye (1972), The Ice Age (1977), The Middle Ground (1980), and the trilogy comprising The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989) and The Gates of Ivory (1991) are among her titles. She was the editor of the fifth edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, and has written a biography of Arnold Bennett (1974) and Angus Wilson (1995). Her elder sister is the novelist A S Byatt.

Bibliography: V G Myer, Margaret Drabble: Puritanism and Permissiveness (1974)