A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman
The Collected Stories
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £2.49
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- £2.49
Publisher Description
Novelist, critic and biographer, Margaret Drabble is one of the major literary figures of her generation. This collection shows her to be a leading practitioner of the art of the short story, presenting her complete short fiction for the first time in a single volume, spanning four decades, from 1964 to 2000.
Several of the stories, like The Dower House at Kellynch, are set in Somerset and Dorset and reflect their author's intimate knowledge of the land and flora there, but their settings also range as far as Elba and Cappadocia. Taken as a whole, the stories reflect the social changes of the past forty years, by showing the English at home and abroad. In 'The Gifts of War', peace-protesting students clash with a mother buying a toy for her son, with tragic consequences. An Englishman on honeymoon has a brief but significant epiphany, finding a shared humanity with a Moroccan crowd in 'Hassan's Tower'. Their protagonists are men and women, husbands and lovers, television presenters and housewives, all subtly and precisely captured as products of their time and place. In his introduction, Spanish scholar José Francisco Fernández celebrates the 'pure and simple pleasure to be found in reading these survivalist, questioning, belligerently intense short stories'.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This collection from one of the United Kingdom's finest contemporary fiction writers reflects both the development of dame Drabble's work as well as the decades in which societal expectations for women and women's expectations of themselves were rapidly shifting. With the first story having originally been published in 1964 and the last in 2000, readers will enjoy following the leitmotifs of Drabble's worlds while also recognizing the evolution of her craft and the choices or her heroines. A marked consistency also defines Drabble's characters, though. Often complex, usually unsettled, these women defy compartmentalization. Nearly all also retain a constant inner-monologue, by which Drabble provides an intriguing contrast to the "show-don't-tell" mantra of so many American short story writers. The women in these stories do tell, at least to themselves, what they're feeling and thinking and wondering, even or especially when they're actions don't easily mirror their thoughts. "The Gifts of War," about a young mother so smitten with her young son that she's ignoring the abuses of her drunken husband, and "A Success Story," in which an established playwright turns down the advances of a celebrity but remains frank (with herself) about her desires, are particularly compelling.
