"MARGARET Drabble?" commented a colleague, "Married to Michael Holroyd - curious living arrangements and famous for not getting on with big sister Antonia." Perhaps it is unnecessary to add that this bluffer's guide to one of Britain's most respected literary figures was delivered by a man. To any literate woman between the ages of 35 and 70 the name of Drabble conjures up quite a different picture.
From the early 1960s onwards our lives were mirrored and mapped by her stories of love, life and loneliness. Starting with A Summer Birdcage in 1963, published when she was only 24 and already married (to actor Clive Francis) and babied, she wrote about life as it was for her and for us, as we faced our new-peeled 1960s freedom still dressed in the strait-jacket of female servitude bequeathed by the generations which preceded us.
Unlike her French contemporary Francoise Sagan whose Bonjour Tristesse proved a one-hit-wonder, novel followed novel. "In my early books I was more interested in those immediate problems: motherhood, depression, immediate personal problems, which were in fact quite large social issues which I think is why my books caught on, because there were an awful lot of people in that position and we were not prepared to put up with it as our mothers had done, our mothers who were just so accepting that this was life."
Catch on they did. Drabble became that rare creature, a literary novelist whose books sold in block buster proportions. To date she has sold nearly two million Penguin books in the UK alone.
It was only when the youngest of her three children had flown the nest that the focus of her writing changed and she became "interested in how things are rather than the stories of the characters".
Signposting this change of direction was The Radiant Way, the title of which came from her first reading primer. "On the cover we had a lovely picture of little children walking into the glorious light of reading. And that is what I used to believe. Then I looked around and realised it wasn't quite happening, that a lot of people were being left out and weren't marching forward into the glorious future at all and that schools hadn't got better and were actually getting slightly worse and the optimism of the 1960s had just diluted in some way and become less radiant."
She despairs old the current level of debate on education ("abysmal") and television is "a wicked medium". Somehow we have lost our vision, she says. As if we have read too much. "A sort of paralysis of the overweight of history and the past.
"We are a frightened society. We're frightened of stepping out of line and . . . frightened of change and we really do feel that there's not much we can do about anything. Politicians are exactly the same as one another, they dare not do anything or say anything either. What I feel is missing now, which I used to feel in the 1960s and 1970s, is a sense of social progress. Nobody has any sense of things getting better. They're just terrified of losing what they've got."
The only aspiration with any common currency, believes Drabble, is the middle-class dream, as conjured up in countless glossy magazines and, of course, Aga sagas. All these concerns come together in her new novel The Witch Of Exmoor, which, in spite of its title, sets itself firmly in the farmhouse kitchen world of moneyed and manicured Hampshire. Although within commuting distance of London, its green-wellied inhabitants see themselves as stewards of the rural idyll.
"Having the Aga in the first paragraph was a conscious joke. I don't want to write books like that. I do feel there's a temptation to complacency in that kind of writing, in that kind of world, which I suppose my, novel attempts to deconstruct."
Drabble writes with the amused detachment of a gimlet-eyed outsider. Her background she describes as only middle class-ish. "My mother was definitely working class. I never feel quite at home in middle class society. But I do find them fascinating. Frankly most of us are middle class now. The middle class dream is very very powerful and attractive. We come thither, we cluster from different directions, which is one of the things I try to show in the novel, that wherever the characters come from they end up in this house with the Aga because that's the image we have of the good life.
It is a dream that would seem to have become reality for Drabble herself. The "curious" separate houses arrangement she and biographer Michael Holroyd enjoyed for the first 12 years of their marriage has recently come to an end and literary London's most famous couple now live together in his spacious - if perhaps not gracious north London Victorian house, though Drabble still high-tails it down to her cottage in rural Somerset when she can. ("I know that it's important for me to get away from town. There is something very good about getting away from this barrage of words, other people's words.") Complete with welcoming fire in the grate and invitations on the mantel-piece the twin-belIed Drabble/Holroyd establishment lacks only the emblematic Aga to achieve full middle class status.
Margaret Drabble was born in Yorkshire in 1939 the second of four children. Her working class mother had won a scholarship to Cambridge, an extraordinary feat in 1930s Britain. Her father was a lawyer. The Drabbles were a high-achieving family: all three sisters followed their mother to Newnham College, Cambridge. Big sister Antonia is the novelist A.S. Byatt. Little sister Helen is an art historian. ("She very sensibly just cleared straight out and did her own thing.") According to Drabble it was her mother who was responsible for the rivalry that existed (exists?) between the two older sisters. "She egged us on to be top of everything. She pitted 05 against each other."
"At the time I was unconscious of it. But I now realise how infuriating I was as a little sister because she was clever, but I was clever. She got a good degree, I got a good degree. I wrote a book, she wrote a book. I can see it was annoying. She was more annoyed than me because she was older and she felt I was chasing along behind." And Drabble was the first one to publish a book.
Without giving too much away (for all her state-of-the-nation subtext, Drabble has never lost sight of the need for a good plot) the particularly grim death of a sister is a central mystery in The Witch Exmoor. Was this, I suggest, a novelist's way of dealing with a sibling that one would rather do without? Drabble claims not. She and her sister who strangely she never refers to by her first name, are on good terms now. "That storyline came partly from an aunt of mine who did commit suicide and I've never known why. She was my father's sister. I have photographs of her as a young woman and the story rather haunted me. My book is about family and the dangers of family and how we destroy one another and I suppose that was part of the feeling."
As we speak she suddenly remembers an early novel of her sister's, The Ganie. "It's about two sisters, one of whom drives the other to suicide, but I can't remember why now. So maybe I was repeating that plot."
Fortunately she hasn't remembered it until this moment. It seems there are clearly very real reasons for the estrangement that in some eyes defines both women to the point of eclipsing their work. "There is a problem in that we are both using the same material. So much of one's writing is to do with the past. You kind of feel you don't want to talk about certain things. You need to do it on your own." As if, once used by one sister, the memory loses its power? "It's like not wanting to read about something or talk about something that might inhibit you.
There should be no such conflict of interests with her recent appointment to the panel of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. (She was in Dublin recently regarding the 1997 Award). "It's a very international set-up, which is why I was attracted to it. I tend not to read much in translation. My reading tends to be very parochial. I know too many people who write and I'm always trying to catch up with reading their books. And if you read everything that your friends and family publish, then that's it. But this opens things up very excitingly.
Drabble admits to not having read all her sister's books and only read Possession, Byatt's Booker-winning novel of five years ago last summer. "I thought it was wonderful but I was glad I hadn't read it before because she uses the Yorkshire coast where we used to go for our childhood holidays, and about three years ago I made a tiny little film about it which was such a delight and joy to do but I wouldn't have dared do it had I known she had already used it."
