Margaret Drabble and the Sense of Possibility

ELLEN Z. LAMBERT Margaret Drabble and the Sense of Possibility Margaret Drabble's novels are being read - and talked about - increasingly both in England and North America. The talk is predictably varied, even contradictory, in its import. Her work is praised for its fine criticism of contemporary English society and for its sympathetic portrayal of domestic life - love, marriage, and the bearing of children; yet it is also accused of falsifying both these spheres. This essay is written in praise of Drabble's fictions, but I am not primarily interested in how accurately she describes the way we live now (though she often does that very well indeed, there are others who do it better). What does interest me is how accurately, how richly, she renders a particular mood, a particularstate of mind. Further, though I am not sure that she would agree with me, I believe that her true strength as a writer is a lyric strength: what happens in her novels is not really the important thing. Indeed in this area her reader must be willing to tolerate a good deal of implausibility - implausible minor characters, implausible plots, and (especially) implausible endings. But ifwe do tolerate these things, we do so because we know how little they interfere with the essential pleasure of reading Drabble. The following pages are an attempt to define that pleasure, to isolate the special experience her fiction at its best has to offer us. It is, at bottom, the same pleasure, the same experience, she herself finds in the novels of Arnold Bennett: 'He always leaves me: she says, 'with a sense that life is full of possibility." That phrase, I should say, describes more aptly the vital quality of her own work. And particularly of her heroines, for it's what preeminently they share - an eagerness, an ineradicable hopefulness about life. Not contentment: they're not particularly contented women. And certainly not complacency: if Drabble's heroines feel hopeful about life it's not because they are unacquainted with despair. It is the play of hope against opposing currents of emotion that defines the special atmosphere of Drabble's fictional world. Her biography of Bennett (the Sheffield youth turned Londoner with whom she so closely identifies) is built around this same interplay. Consider the opening sentence of that work: 'Arnold Bennett was born on a street called Hope Street.' And then, immediately: 'A street less hopeful would be hard to imagine. ' 2 The sign declares hope, and the sign, we're told, is misleading, for Bennett's origins were of course anything but auspiUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER 3, SPRING II)&> 0042.°247180/°5°0-0228$01.50/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS MARGARET DRABBLE 229 cious. Yet, in a deeper sense, this is justthe right sign, for the story about to unfold will be, we know, a great success story. So Bennett's life (or Bennett's life as chronicled by Margaret Drabble) and so perhaps Margaret Drabble's life: the scattered comments she has made publicly on the subject suggest that she sees her own life in very much these same terms.3 But here I want to consider this theme of hopefulness, or hope against hope, as it is elaborated in fictional rather than real lives. I shall be discussing three novels - A Summer Bird-Cage, Jerusalem the Golden, and The Realms of Gold; but in discussing these I shall chiefly be discussing three heroines, for the novel is in each case an extension of the consciousness of the woman at its centre. They are all, to my mind, engaging women, and for many ofthe same reasons. Sarah and Clara and Frances are rather like sisters, and as with sisters one enjoys perceiving both similarities and dissimilarities. In moving from one novel and one heroine to the next I shall be conSidering both these things, but primarily those recurrent features which identify the Drabble heroine, which make her what she is. I speak here of the Drabble heroine as we like to speak of, say, the Jane Austen heroine: when we read Emma and Pride and Prejudice we simply feel we know that those clever, high-spirited young...