ABSTRACT
The phrase easily takes on condescending overtones, and was associated with descriptions of her as “the novelist of maternity,” whose work was devoted to “coping with frigidity and nappies.” The view of her as a novelist whose exploration of the daily lives of middle-class women is inherently trivial and disconnected from larger social and political matters has persisted, despite all evidence to the contrary. From her comparatively slight first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, Margaret Drabble’s first-person characterizations grow in depth and subtlety, reaching their culmination in the portrait of Jane Gray in her most technically experimental narrative, The Waterfall. One must note both the extraordinary potential and the limited aspiration of these Bennett sisters, who recall and vividly contrast with Jane Austen’s Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice. This ideal absent lover conveniently prevents Sarah both from having to deal with sexuality in her narrative and from having definitely to place herself within or without the bird-cage of marriage.
