MARGARET DRABBLE AND EXMOOR
Novelist, biographer and critic Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939. She was educated at the Mount School, a Quaker boarding school in York, and read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She became an actress and worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon before her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, the story of the relationship between two sisters, was published in 1963.
A theme of her novels is the correlation between contemporary English society and its individual members. Her characters represent segments of society, reflecting the political and economical situation and the restrictiveness of conservative surroundings. Her main characters are mostly women. They often relate to her own experiences whilst being entirely fictional. Thus, her first novels describe the life of young women during the late 1960s and 1970s. The conflict between motherhood and career is brought into focus. Fictional conflicts of everyday life such as unwanted pregnancy in The Millstone are shown with wit and irony. Her other novels include The Garrick Year (1964), set in the theatre world; Jerusalem the Golden (1967), about a young woman from the north of England at university in London; The Waterfall (1969), an experimental narrative; The Needle's Eye (1972), the story of a young heiress who gives away her inheritance; and The Realms of Gold (1975), about a prominent archaeologist juggling the different aspects of her life. The Ice Age (1977) examines the social and economic plight of England in the mid-1970s while in The Middle Ground (1980) a journalist is forced to take-stock of her life. The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989) and The Gates of Ivory (1991) form a trilogy of novels describing the experiences of three friends living through the 1980s. The Peppered Moth (2001) explores four generations in one family. Candida Wilton, the central character in her novel The Seven Sisters (2002), begins a new life in London after the breakdown of her marriage. Her most recent novel is The Sea Lady (2006).
Margaret is a highly acclaimed writer and has received many literary awards for her novels. She was awarded the CBE in 1980. Alhough best known for her novels, she has also written several screenplays, plays and short stories, as well as non-fiction such as A Writer's Britain: Landscape and Literature and biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. Her critical works include studies of William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy and she has also edited two editions of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. Margaret also sometimes works as a journalist.
Margaret's sister is the novelist and critic A. S. Byatt and she is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd, who was also awarded a CBE for literature and later knighted. For many years Margaret lived in the North London village of Hampstead. After her marriage in 1982, the couple settled in the Notting Hill district of London and at Porlock Weir, where they live in a converted limekiln. "We’re the last house in Somerset," said Margaret, describing her hideaway in Porlock Weir. "We look right across the sea to Wales. You look out across this amazingly beautiful water. The evening walk is up to one of the many churches that call themselves the smallest church in England. It’s very steep going up, and then you come down to sea-level. It’s just of such ravishing beauty. I love it. And that’s that."
Margaret is well known in the Porlock area and has become patron of the Porlock Arts Festival. Her novel:The Witch of Exmoor (1996) is a portrait of contemporary Britain set in London and Exmoor. She uses this novel to attack Margaret Thatcher's legacy - a country Americanised by superstores, by ''ring roads and beefburgers'', fast food and mass travel. She dislikes many things American and also some things British, including the ''Heritage Industry.'' The narrative is often from the author's point of view, with Margaret clearly deciding what her characters are going to do or think. Frieda Haxby Palmer is the witch of the novel's title and the only character that is unpredictable in that she is not bound by the section of society in which she lives. The Palmer family are a normal, middle class English family but Margaret fills her characters with the faults of that part of society, including racism and greed. Frieda's hates these aspets of society and becomes eccentric to the point of insanity. She moves to Exmoor to a house clearly based on Glenthorne, where she eventually dies. Her will causes rifts in the Palmer family. The house and Exmoor are a means of escape for Frieda and some of her family. There is much description of the coast between Porlock Weir and the Foreland and an episode featuring a stag hunt.