Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, DBE, FRSL (born 5 June 1939)[1] is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.

[3] She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960, and, before leaving to pursue a career in literary studies and writing, served as an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Rigg.

While their relationship was not especially close and they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation as "normal sibling rivalry"[9] and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists" and that the sisters "always have liked each other on the bottom line.

[3] In the same interview she admitted there were three writers for whom she felt an "immense admiration": Angus Wilson, Saul Bellow and Doris Lessing.

She recalled George Orwell's words in Nineteen Eighty-Four about "the intoxication of power" and "the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

Most of her protagonists are women[12][13][14] and the realistic descriptions of her figures often derive from Drabble's personal experiences; thus, her first novels describe the life of young women during the 1960s and 1970s, for whom the conflict between motherhood and intellectual challenges is being brought into focus, while The Witch of Exmoor, published in 1996, shows the withdrawn existence of an elderly writer.

As Hilary Mantel wrote in 1989: "Drabble's heroines have aged with her, becoming solid and sour, more prone to drink and swear; yet with each successive book their earnest, moral nature blossoms".

[16] She maintained this approach for her first three books, having "liberated myself from the neutral critical prose of the university essay", which she nevertheless admitted she had enjoyed writing.

[16] She used the personal experience of one of her own children's diagnosis with a lesion (a hole in the heart) to inform her writing on the illness she gave the child.

[16] On the book's fiftieth anniversary in 2015, Tessa Hadley described it as "the seminal 60s feminist novel that Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is always supposed to be".

[1] Her eighth novel The Ice Age, published in 1977, is set in 1970s England and the social and economic conditions of that time.

[1] Drabble's fourteenth novel The Peppered Moth, published in 2001, treats of a young girl growing up in a mining town in South Yorkshire and spans four generations of her family.

[1] The Observer referred to part of her sixteenth novel, The Red Queen (published in 2004), as "psychodrabble", noting her claim in the book's preface that she is seeking "universal transcultural human characteristics".

[19] Ursula K. Le Guin compared Drabble's seventeenth novel, The Sea Lady (published in 2006), favourably with her earlier book The Needle's Eye.

[22][23] Drabble's other writing includes several screenplays, plays and short stories, as well as non-fiction such as A Writer's Britain: Landscape and Literature and biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson.