The novels of Margaret Drabble tell an old story, the struggle of the individual toward identity, and her version of the tale is extreme. Her heroines suffer confusions about the self that, at times, border on the pathological….

Like children, Drabble's women struggle. Her stories emerge from the anarchy in which Freud locates the origins of human consciousness. Awareness of self develops, according to Freud, as the infant first identifies with the human figures surrounding it. The child wakes into confusion and learns, slowly, of the difference between self and other. Insofar as the problem of her heroine (to separate from the other and achieve a clarity about the self) is the problem of the child, Drabble's novels suggest the extent to which our society has succeeded in infantilizing its female members. Drabble's fictions posit the family as the source of this infantilization: they also posit, as the...