The Middle Ground is Margaret Drabble's … most complex and technically ambitious work. It is both an extension and an elaboration of her sustained chronicle of urban life over the past two decades—a period for women of hope, freedom, and challenge amid enormous tension and struggle. The Middle Ground, as its title suggests, is a novel of temporal and spatial perspective. While its characters explore their past and present and seek to assess their lives from the vantage point of early middle age, the novel more generally expresses a sustained commentary on the complex social and moral world they inhabit. (p. 91)

The Middle Ground reflects a struggle for form, an attempt to accommodate the author's impulse to probe deeply the individual consciousness and at the same time look more broadly at the pulse of society at large. This is an ambitious challenge that Drabble has set for herself...