[A Summer Bird-Cage] is told by Sarah Bennett, just down from Oxford, working at the BBC…. Her ambition—to write a novel as good as Lucky Jim—is itself enough to predispose one in her favour. Miss Drabble's novel takes in effortlessly many background scenes—Paris, Oxford, suburban Warwick-shire, backstage theatre and the London of bed-sitters and bottle-parties. It is bleakly informative about such things as the horrors of sharing flats with other girls; but what is really impressive in it is the continual sense of the heroine's efforts to achieve genuine relationships with other people and with the world about her, efforts high-lighted in the contrasting account of the failure of her beautiful and predatory elder sister's marriage, which is the heart of the book. A Summer Bird-Cage seems to me very close to the grain of immediate contemporary life. (p. 466)

Walter Allen, "All for Art," in...