Margaret Drabble anticipated the feminist movement by writing early in her career about educated women's experiences of marriage and motherhood in conflict with career ambition. Her range has widened as she has been translated into sixteen languages and received honorary doctorates and the rank of Commander of the British Empire (1980), but her preoccupations remain constant, reflecting her nonconformist background of conscientious striving and her socialist convictions. She was born on 4 June 1939 in Sheffield, an industrial town in the north of England. Her roots are provincial, not cosmopolitan, though now she lives in Hampstead, a wealthy and fashionable part of London, inhabited by what its detractors ironically label "champagne socialists," the British equivalent of "radical chic." Drabble was the middle daughter of the late John and Marie Bloor Drabble, both first-generation Cambridge students from fairly humble backgrounds. Her father's parents owned a small candy factory, and John Drabble left...