Echoes of the past, intimations of the future: Working through the tradition of industrial fiction in the novels of Margaret Drabble

This study examines the novelistic career of Margaret Drabble. Her first five novels are "women's novels," centering on young women learning to cope with life and find places in the world. However, the third of these, The Millstone, turns toward a broader vision. Its protagonist develops empathy for the working class, whose condition is portrayed with detailed sympathy, thereby rendering it a precursor to Drabble's later work in the tradition of nineteenth-century "industrial" or social problem novels. Drabble was attracted to that tradition for various reasons, including her family's working- and lower-middle-class ancestry, her tradition-steeped education, her conviction of the primary importance of social conscience in fiction, and her desire to portray a recognizable external reality.; Drabble's sixth novel, The Needle's Eye, begins to chronicle the economic, political, social and physical changes taking place in Britain. Like many of her nineteenth-century forbears, she writes from the perspective of a liberal, middle-class woman, sympathetic to the working and immigrant classes, aware of the need for adaptation and progress, yet ambivalent about their effects on England. She struggles to redefine gender roles, to explore the morality of wealth, privilege, and business, to search for meaning and grace in a world of commerce and industry, and to find some explanation for the increasing violence exploding around her.; Drabble's Wordsworthian "visions" are a variant of "alternative spaces," providing a way to ameliorate the reality of post-industrial Britain, "love the grim landscapes" and imagine a way forward. In The Gates of Ivory these visions are replaced by a "female menstrual-blood internationalism," which appears to offer Drabble's best hope for the world. Here Drabble's career achieves its latest evolutionary stage, as she throws traditional literary decorum aside and arrives at a metafictional, post-modern, post- colonial narrative mode, still managing to retain her moral voice.