An Interview with Dame Margaret Drabble

Abstract

Dame Margaret Drabble is one of Britain's leading novelists and critics. She has published seventeen novels, two acclaimed literary biographies (on Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson), and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, for its 1985 and 2000 editions. The following interview has several key areas of focus: literary influences; the literary prize; realism as a mode, and Drabble's use of it; the state of the nation novel; gender and 'women's writing'. We discussed the author's novels as they arose while talking of these subjects.