Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939. She has two sisters and a brother. Her father, John Frederick Drabble, was a barrister, and her mother, Marie Bloor Drabble, a teacher at the Mount in York, a Quaker school, the same school that her daughter attended later. After finishing school, Margaret Drabble went to Newnham College, Cambridge, and graduated brilliantly in English literature. She married early an has three children, a daughter and two sons.

She began writing, when she was expecting her first child. In her early novels she concentrated on domestic problems and the lives and dilemmas of educated young women, caught in the conflicts of motherhood, matrimony, and career aspirations. In her more recent novels her canvas has broadened to include present day economic and social problems in Britain. Margaret Drabble has also written short stories and plays as well as a considerable body of literary criticism, such as a study on the romantic poet William Wordsworth (1966), a biography of the novelist Arnold Bennett (1974), and A Writer`s Britain: Landscape in Literature (1979).

During the years of 1980-1985 she worked as the editor of the new edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, a standard work of reference, which was published in 1985. Margaret Drabble has also written numerous articles for periodicals, worked for the BBC, and given lectures in Britain and abroad for the Arts Council and the British Council. She taught for several years in adult education at Morley College in South London. Since 1982, she has been married to the well-known biographer Michael Holroyd.

Her novels in chronological order are:

• A Summer Bird-Cage (1963),
• The Garrick Year (1964),
• The Millstone (1966),
• Jerusalem the Golden (1968),
• The Waterfall (1969),
• The Needle`s Eye (1972),
• The Realms of Gold (1975),
• The Ice Age (1977),
• The Middle Ground (1980),
• The Radiant Way (1987).

Links: Margaret Drabble's Homepage