Lord Byron in Albanian Dress, by Thomas Philips

When I was twenty-one, I read Margaret Drabble’s Jerusalem the Golden, a novel I identified with so intensely that I began to fear it was a flaw in my taste and not a virtue of the novel that made it feel to me so indelible. So for fifteen years it remained the only book of hers I read. I had gathered, though, a small collection of her work from our local library’s booksale, as if in unconscious anticipation of this moment, two months ago, when my toddler pulled The Waterfall off my living room’s bookshelf, and there it lay, facing me like a dare, with its battered, goofily mystical cover. It proved, to my surprise, far better than this cover — which showed a dewy woman staring up at a swirl of birds, as if at a dream — and far different from its comically offensive back cover copy, which selectively quotes, and with misplaced earnestness, from Byron’s Don Juan: “love is of man’s life a thing apart, / Tis woman’s whole existence…” (Canto I, CXCIV). (The line actually begins “man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,” which has a funny little double meaning). Nonetheless the implications of this offhand cant on the back of the book made me furious each night when I put it down, much to my husband’s exhaustion. Don Juan is satiric poem, people–we’re not meant to take its melodrama about women’s helplessness as gospel.

Then I turned to The Garrick Year, a few weeks later, in London (this May). This I loved even more: a lighter touch, yet leaving more of a residue. What begins as a comedy turns deftly into a minor key masterpiece about loneliness and coping. And it’s not what you think, that revolting term that starts with a Ch. and a L. It is as lusty, risky, well-plotted and bookish as her American male contemporaries, those big guns of the 60s whose reputations can’t be contained, and whose novels are even more available than her own in their trade paperback editions at library booksales across the country.

And, by the way, what did we think of Carmen Callil’s recent fob against Philip Roth? I thought it was somewhat deserved, if impolitic. But my larger, if related, question here is why Margaret Drabble fell off to the margins of the literary map, my own included (although this doesn’t seem to be so in London itself…)? Why does popularity in their time seem to ruin women writers in a way that it doesn’t for men (read: Roth)? I do wish Drabble had come up more often in the recent Franzen-inflected debates about whether women can write great big novels.

Once home, I recommended The Garrick Year to a friend, who was in town with her family because her husband was filming a movie here this spring. Hesitantly, I offered the novel’s plot–a woman, with her children and nanny, follows her actor husband out to the sticks for his job in summer stock. She seemed offended by the parallel. We’d like to think that we’re beyond such dynamics. Maybe I’d have been offended as well, if I were her. But it all rang true, this novel, when I read it, although it was written forty years ago.

And if there’s anything to be offended by, it’s the quote Drabble’s publisher chose as a blurb for the 1970’s copy of The Realms of Gold that I’m currently reading:  “Years ago she anticipated the whole feminist movement, although she’s much to clear-eyed and honest to indulge in any of its bitchy grievances” (Kirkus Reviews). I guess this reviewer didn’t read her that closely, because she feels plenty aggrieved, to me, if too canny about her times (which continue to the present) to be outright bitchy and so potentially estranging.