The Waterfall is "the most female of all [Drabble's] books" not because, as she suggests, it begins with childbirth and ends with a thrombic-clot induced by contraceptive pill-taking, but because it considers the situation of a woman who does not deny her generic femininity, whose first words in the novel, far from asserting her will, announce her essential passivity: "If I were drowning I couldn't reach out a hand to save myself, so unwilling am I to set myself up against my fate."

Fate is a word and a concept which pervades Margaret Drabble's fiction…. The "fate" that Jane acknowledges has something to do with her "nature," and she claims to be powerless to resist it…. Jane is governed by her female sexuality. (pp. 83-4)

Perhaps the most obvious formal feature of The Waterfall is the split in its narrative structure…. The Waterfall alternates between sections of first-...