Matthew Richardson

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman – review round-up

Margaret Drabble has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a novelist and biographer. But do her short stories match the standard of her other work?
 
Stevie Davies, in the Independent, certainly thinks so. He confesses to having been ‘desperately moved’ by the collection. In it, she argues, ‘Drabble exposes and anatomises the tissue of women’s private pains, shames and fears.’ Similarly, her use of the short story form is notable: both ‘the form’s power of ambivalence and understatement, its canny and cunning obliquities’ and her use of its ‘miniscule and transient shifts of perception’ contribute to the elegiac tone. And, for some of the stories, this delicious ambiguity emerges as the overriding theme. As she puts it: ‘the enigma stays with us.’
 
In the Sunday Times, Lindsay Duguid argues (£) that the short stories ‘offer a sampler of her particular concerns.’ Englishness is a major concern as is the dialectic of the ‘daily grind…juxtaposed with a hazier vision of escape.’ Equally, there is perhaps something of a ‘political agenda’ here: ‘broad scenarios of social justice and pacifism, often combined with a strong feminist critique of the status quo’ underpin Drabble’s literary vision, although, Duguid argues, Drabble ‘sometimes gives the impression of wanting to move beyond the daily round of the short story.’ However, taken together, the ‘collection offers an acutely honest and personal conspectus on the past 40 years’.
 
Elaine Showalter, in the Guardian, draws parallels between the short stories and Drabble’s other work. For her ‘the stories dwell upon themes familiar from Drabble’s novels – the perils of artistic vocation and, especially, the penalties of distinction and fame, for accomplished women’. Fundamentally, Showalter argues, the short stories amount to a significant statement in Drabble’s career: ‘Although Drabble wrote relatively few short stories, she used them to explore important themes…and to consider not only her place among the women writers but also her heritage from the English poets; and to claim her rightful place in a writer’s Britain.’







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