A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories - Hardcover

Drabble, Margaret

3.72

951 ratings by Goodreads

9780141196046: A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0141196041 ISBN 13: 9780141196046

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2011

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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 Jose Francisco Fernandez celebrates the 'pure and simple pleasure to be found in reading these survivalist, questioning, belligerently intense short stories'.

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Review:

Brims with sharply observed life and the author's seemingly infinite sympathy for "ordinary women" (Joyce Carol Oates)

Drabble writes so penetratingly about the female condition that it is impossible not to laugh, wince and admire (Amanda Craig New Statesman)

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Margaret Drabble

“Reading Margaret Drabble’s novels has become something of a rite of passage . . . [They are] sharply observed, exquisitely companionable tales of women of a certain age and class, educated, egocentric, strong, unlucky in love.”—Washington Post

“Gorgeous writing . . . [Drabble’s] flawed and oh-so-human characters appall and enthrall.”—Boston Globe

“As meticulous as Jane Austen, and as deadly as Evelyn Waugh.”—Los Angeles Times

“Margaret Drabble will have done for late-twentieth-century London what Dickens did for Victorian London.”—New York Times

“The intensity, the seriousness, the playfulness—I loved, and still love, these characteristics of Drabble’s work, as I do the sense of a writer continually interrogating the nature of the world, and of our place in it.”—Andrea Barrett

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