Margaret Drabble quits fiction

I was troubled to find out recently that Margaret Drabble has decided to stop writing novels, claiming that she is afraid of repeating herself as she grows older. The story was reported in the Guardian and in somewhat snarkier form in the Telegraph.

Margaret Drabble has been one of my favorite writers for many years, and I borrowed the title of one of her novels for this blog. Though I haven’t enjoyed her later novels as much as I did The Ice Age, The Realms of Gold, and the Radiant Way trilogy, it still bothers me to think that there won’t be any more. Maybe because all good things come to an end, and I don’t like to be reminded of it. Or maybe because it seems an illustration of how life—advancing age, her husband’s illness, the long unpleasantness between Drabble and her sister A.S. Byatt—triumphs over art. The undercurrent of melancholy has always been pretty strong in Drabble’s work, but she created some beautiful art from it.

At least there’s still her memoir The Pattern in the Carpet to read, as soon as it’s available in the States.