ABSTRACT
The 1956 Suez debacle has long been taken as the symbol of Britain's demise as a front-line world power, and the fortunes of the British novel have often been seen to mirror this downward path after the Second World War. The majority of British writers have deferred to the dominant tradition of the English novel which stretches from Fielding, Defoe and Richardson in the eighteenth century, through Austen, the Brontes, Dickens and George Eliot, up to Conrad and Lawrence in the twentieth century. Margaret Drabble's first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, is a fair example of the 'women on the brink of liberation' novel, and of what the standard, good, middle-brow British novel was believed to be. Drabble's fictional world is one of relationships and interiors, the kind of cosy provincialism that has given British fiction a bad name and from which it has often felt obliged to free itself.
