ABSTRACT
From Jerusalem the Golden to The Needle’s Eye and The Realms of Gold, one can trace Margaret Drabble’s skillful and increasingly playful use of the third-person point of view and her gradual broadening of novelistic space. The conflicting needs to break away from the past and to come to terms with it inform these three novels and recall others by Margaret Drabble’s contemporaries, such as Lessing’s Martha Quest series, Braine’s Room at the Top, and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. From Jerusalem the Golden to The Needle’s Eye and The Realms of Gold, one can trace Drabble’s skillful and increasingly playful use of the third-person point of view and her gradual broadening of novelistic space. Jerusalem the Golden does indeed seem different from the other early novels because it is told in the third person, though the most interesting and problematic aspect of the book remains its point of view.
