ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how food functions to negotiate and re imagine domestic duty and female desire in novels by three British women writers publishing in the 1960s: Margaret Drabble, Penelope Mortimer and Doris Lessing. It takes a different focus: women's novels that explore day-to-day female experience in the domestic sphere using the Realist mode. Margaret Drabble's 1964 novel The Garrick Year emphasizes from its very beginning the role food plays within the larger thematic concern. The 1960s women's novel examines the tensions between expectations of duty and female desire primarily in relation to sex: the withholding of sex, the pursuit of sex, and the bid for the recognition of female sexuality. The advertisement offers a glamorous image that marries the shining kitchen of a domestic haven to the moist, curved, delightful lips of sexual promise through the luxury of not just any old chocolate cake but a new kind of chocolate cake.
