Since the 1970s Margaret Drabble has been the preeminent British woman of letters. Critics and admirers have compared her work to that of George Eliot and Jane Austen, and, indeed, Drabble's writings, like Eliot's, include fiction, literary criticism, biography, and social commentary. Drabble has also written introductions for a paperback collection of a novella and two unfinished novels by Austen and an edition of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847). Most of Drabble's novels deal with family life, and much of her later fiction has also been preoccupied with social issues. She often depicts women's struggles for identity in a society where the roles of women are changing, seeking to achieve emotional, economic, and moral freedom while fulfilling their roles as wives and mothers.

Margaret Drabble was born on 5 June 1939 in Sheffield, Yorkshire, the second of the four children of John Frederick and Kathleen Marie Bloor Drabble. Drabble has maintained...