A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Read Free

Britain (1979), an almost mystic devotion to the land itself, a pure affection that eases her painful love for England. Most readers will probably share Elsa Palmer’s grief in ‘The Merry Widow’ when the old man from the village destroys her private Eden in Dorset, her little paddock at the back of the Mill House, which had been her source of healing peace. There is certainly moral strife in the story, a personal betterment achieved through suffering, but the watercolour of wild flowers growing in profusion makes up for the misery Elsa endures.
    A luxurious and lustful delight in the overpowering landscape can also be found in ‘Stepping Westward’, as seen by the twenty-year-old who had once been the schoolteacher Mary Mogg:
Ferns sprouted like orchids from the trunks of vast oaks overhanging the rapid rivers, ivy with berries like grapes rampaged up ash and beech in tropical splendour, and hollies soared towards the sky. Primeval lichens of grey and sage green and dazzling orange encrusted bark and twig and stone, and the red earth broke into bubbles of scarlet and purple and bright spongy yellow.
    This is an interesting angle from which to consider someone labelled as the moral conscience of her generation. Drabble does indeed surprise the prejudiced mind in these stories: a woman rekindles an adulterous old flame in a public bar; an intelligent female writer relishes the sexual longing that she provokes in a man of worldly fame; a famous TV presenter heroically speaks about the future to a school audience of children and parents while bleeding profusely, due to a gynaecological examination. There is certainly a dialogue with the tradition the author hails from – Wordsworth’s voice, for instance, can be heard in ‘Stepping Westward’ – but Drabble has always been able to supersede that same tradition (‘How I dislike Jane Austen’, Jane Gray had said in The Waterfall ) by an exploration of different kinds of consciousness, revising from the inside old forms of writing.
    After the trilogy of the late eighties and early nineties ( The Radiant Way , A Natural Curiosity , The Gates of Ivory ) her novels have, in their own quiet way, endeavoured to open new paths for fiction, entering the realm of the supernatural and flirting with uncertain areas of the occult in The Witch of Exmoor , or courting the underworld and revisiting myths of a dark nature in The Seven Sisters (2002). Similarly, the unexpected comes up in her short stories, where she convincingly portrays a mentally unstable character in ‘Homework’ or when she chooses a geneticist as the protagonist of ‘The Caves of God’, anticipating her interest in genealogy, DNA research and matrilineal descent in The Peppered Moth . The lack of closure in ‘The Dower House at Kellynch’ is intriguing too, as is the intersection of this narrative with ‘Stepping Westward’, when the protagonist of the first story appears in the background of the second one as an old acquaintance of the reader, thus adding elements of playful intertextuality to conventional storytelling.
    It has to be said that Margaret Drabble has never disowned the tradition of the social realist novel and has always admitted the powerful influence on her work of the great English novelists of the nineteenth century, George Eliot among them. She has often stated that in her writing she is arguing back, continuing their story. But as her novels of the nineties and the new millennium show, only a short-sighted and uninformed critic could maintain old clichés, as that of Drabble being a ‘typical’ woman novelist of the 1960s and 1970s or that she is a writer clinging to the past. Even a cursory reading of Drabble’s 2004 novel The Red Queen will show that her work has followed a steady pace of innovation. Following the British tradition of long rambling books (she is a great admirer of that rambling constructor J. C. Powys and his A Glastonbury Romance , 1932), she takes the story of