A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Read Free Page A

the Red Queen of Korea of two centuries ago, whose ghost tells the tale of her past to readers across continents and cultures. Current global issues are discussed as well and an intricate plot is developed, with the very English character of Dr Barbara Halliwell, ‘an archetypal middle-class grammar-school girl from Orpington’, as its protagonist. In this novel Margaret Drabble appears as a character, too, and is able to tell Dr Halliwell with postmodern irony that novelists ‘are not to be trusted. They steal; they borrow; they appropriate. You should never tell them anything, if you want to keep it a secret.’
    One, of course, should not underestimate the power of a perfectly balanced syntactic structure: ‘I’d rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.’ This statement, casually expressed by Drabble in a radio programme when she was starting out as a writer, and later reproduced in Bernard Bergonzi’s The Situation of the Novel (1970), has done much to pigeonhole her as a writer out of touch with the fresh winds of changebuffeting the English novel, and this stamp has been difficult to rub away. Take for instance her authorial interventions, a common feature in her novels since The Realms of Gold . Reviewers of her books have frequently viewed these asides as manipulative and irritating ticks in her style, suffocating intrusions by the author, and not as attempts by the writer to bridge the gap that separates her from her readers. It is time for a re-evaluation of Drabble’s work as a whole and for taking into consideration its multifaceted nature. Perhaps the publication of her short stories will stimulate new approaches to her writing.
    No one should really expect contemporary literature to make positive declarations of intention or to have an unquenchable faith in humankind. And Margaret Drabble’s stories do not offer such things either. Many stories in this collection, however, contain their own epiphanic moments, taking bold steps into the future and searching for inner light, and that makes them appropriate for any attempt to find meaningful narratives for our time. Furthermore, and perhaps at the most intimate level, there is a pure and simple pleasure to be found in reading these survivalist, questioning, belligerently intense short stories.
José Francisco Fernández University of Almería, Spain

Note on the Texts
    The stories collected here are arranged chronologically according to their dates of publication. Some of them, however, may offer a variation as to their dates of composition. ‘A Pyrrhic Victory’ was probably the first story that Margaret Drabble wrote, when she was a student at Cambridge University in the late 1950s, but it was not until she was an established writer that it was finally published, in the magazine Nova in 1968. ‘Stepping Westward’ was written on commission for the Wordsworth Society in 1994. In actual fact, however, Drabble read it aloud at the annual meeting of this association in the Lake District at Grasmere, but it was not published until the year 2000 in the Massachusetts literary magazine The Long Story . In this volume, therefore, it appears as the last of the stories Margaret Drabble has published so far.
    Other stories were kept for a time in a drawer for different reasons. ‘The Caves of God’, for example, was not destined for the Time Out anthology; Drabble wrote it for a book about ‘secrets’ which was never published. She rescued it when Nicholas Royle asked her for a story for his collection.
    Two fragments from two of her novels, not included here, were published as short fiction in magazines: ‘The Dying Year’, an excerpt from The Radiant Way , was published in Harper’s magazine in July 1987, and ‘The Dinner Party’, taken from A Natural Curiosity , appeared in Harper’s in September 1989. ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses ’ , Drabble’s first published short text,