Margaret Drabble became famous in the 1960s for her short novels about young women starting life, but she has grown into a much more powerful and interesting novelist through the years into the twenty-first century. The early novels of the sixties coincided with the growth of the Women's Movement, and the preoccupations of the graduate wife and the working mother; they thus first attracted the attention of feminist critics. By 1989, however, Margaret Drabble was saying ‘The Radiant Way is not a woman's book, it's about the decline of western civilisation’, an expansion of subject matter that alienated some of her critics, who stubbornly continued to search her work for female role models and patriarchal oppression. Both feminist themes and social critiques, related as they in any case are, arose from Drabble's own experience. Born in 1939, the second of four children of two first-generation Cambridge graduates (her older sister is A. S. Byatt, the novelist), she grew up during war-time and vividly remembers post-war austerity, when expectations were low and simple luxuries were highly appreciated. Margaret Drabble says ‘I think it's absolutely wonderful to be able to buy a bag of bananas - but this is the war-baby thing - that one is grateful for small mercies. A lot of people aren't’.

Because Drabble's parents had struggled to get to Cambridge at a time when it was much more difficult for working- or lower- middle-class students, they were determined that their children should secure the same advantage; as a reasonably successful barrister, John Drabble was able to send all four children to good, single-sex Quaker boarding schools, from which they went on to Cambridge: Margaret Drabble read English Literature at Newnham, and got a starred first-class degree, the best possible result for an undergraduate, and her reading has informed her writing more perhaps than most other novelists of the period. Immediately she graduated, she married Clive Swift, the actor, who was by now working for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford. Drabble, who had acted in student productions, was anxious to become an actress, and joined her husband in Stratford, where she eventually got small parts and understudying (curiously, however, she dislikes writing plays and does not wish to speak about the ones she has written).