THE GIMLET EYE

Spotlight

For nearly 50 years, Margaret Drabble's work—17 novels and seven books of nonfiction—has held a mirror up to English society, reflecting the warts-and-all truth behind the polite, stiff-upper-lip courtesy smiles of her compatriots. "The rare pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it," Drabble has said, and indeed what her work explores with pointed irony and compassion is the bred-in-the-bone near-pathological refusal to evince any sign of weakness, be it emotional, physical, or moral, and the cost to the individual as well as the culture at large.

While any number of Drabble's books can demonstrate why she's earned the title Dame of the British Empire, her debut collection of stories, A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 14 perfectly turned works written over the length of her career, establishes her cultural relevance and uncompromising vision in one slim volume. "These stories of mine show the development of feminist consciousness, and the changing social world we live in," explains Drabble, who has been married to biographer Michael Holroyd for almost 20 years. "Life is very different now, though some of the problems women face are still with us."

The world that Drabble reveals to readers is one populated predominantly by women of a certain age grappling with their obsessions, pasts, and desires: the seemingly perfect, popular television host trapped in a sham marriage who persists in addressing a girls' school, despite the fact she's hemorrhaging; the widow who leaves her hometown so she can revel in the death of her abusive husband. Drabble shows us why and how these people carry on, what is gained and what is lost in their doing so, without ever once creating the sense she's turned anyone out. A grand feat, and something to smile about.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL

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