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

Margaret Drabble. Edited and With an Introduction By Jose Francisco Fernandez

ISBN 10: 0141196041 / ISBN 13: 9780141196046

Published by Penguin Classics, 2011

About this Item

2011 First edition, third impression. Size octavo, 223 pages. Blue cloth covered boards with gilt titles to the spine, with the dust jacket. Book condition fine, a very clean copy. Dust jacket condition near fine, not price clipped. Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 016432

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman. The Collected Stories
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0141196041
• ISBN 13: 9780141196046
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition, Third Impression.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

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'.

About the Author

Margaret Drabble was born in 1939 in Sheffield, Yorkshire, the daughter of barrister and novelist John F. Drabble, and sister of novelist A.S. Byatt. She is the author of seventeen novels and eight works of non-fiction, including biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. In 1980, Margaret Drabble was made a CBE and in 2008 she was made DBE. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd, and lives in London and Somerset.