Margaret Drabble has written a gravely intelligent novel ["The Garrick Year"] on a familiar theme, the situation of the contemporary young woman, well brought up, well schooled, with enormous vistas promised to her by her family and by her society, who finds her horizons shrunk to diaper-size, all her possibilities reduced to a task that could, essentially, be done by any competent servant. This dog-eared problem, this subject of the self-pitying outbursts of Doris Lessing and the corruscating complaints of Simone de Beauvoir, is treated here as freshly as if it had just come up for the first time.

The young woman in question is a gawkily attractive English girl, married to a Welsh actor (and egomaniac) David Evans…. David, hungry for parts on which his non-meteoric career can rise, decides to play a season in the provinces, at the newly endowed Garrick Theater in Hereford. It is...