Margaret Drabble is the current English Lady Novelist, the one you have to read now as you had to read Iris Murdoch ten years and Elizabeth Bowen thirty years ago. Those who claim The Waterfall is her best so far are right as long as they concede she is doing wonders with very thin material. The story is both standard and dreary, an affair that does and doesn't come off, and Miss Drabble can do nothing new with it outside of having the lovers survive the ritual automobile accident. Throughout, though, and especially in one truly stunning meditation in the middle, she knows how to be sensitive, careful, and brutally honest about her heroine, and in general she writes better about women than anyone I know now writing….

[The section about the real and metaphorical effects of childhood games on maidens and women as they choose and are...