A review by dianahe
A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble

reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

 

Margaret Drabble depicts realistically the quandary of intelligent young women leaving university and starting their new lives. Sarah reflects on „the classlessness and social dislocation that girls of my age and lack of commitments feel“ (p. 96). What was open to such women at that time? In Sarah’s words/thoughts (p.72) „The days are over, thank God, when a woman justifies her existence by marrying. At least that is true until she has children“ . She has spent time in Paris and does not expect to find interesting employment – she’d like to write a book with humour. 

The novel’s main focus is, however, on marriage, and includes motherhood, from its beginning when Sarah returns from Paris to be her sister Louise’s bridesmaid. We learn eventually that Louise married Stephen Halifax because he was rich and she imagined a wonderful life being able to buy whatever she wished. The marriage does not last. 

Sarah’s friend from university, Gill, married Tony for love (and without money) and recently separated from him because she feels humiliated and degraded (pp. 33-35) and is no longer willing just to be her artist husband’s model. 

Louise visits a college friend who is pregnant with her second child, whose husband is out at work, and who lives in chaos at home, without any intellectual challenge. 

Sarah herself is also considering marriage to Francis, currently in America, and learning from others’ experiences and mistakes, will only marry for love. Whether this will happen is left open, as only when Francis returns will they know if they still feel the same. 

„So you’re going to be a don’s wife?“ Wilfred Smee asks her. „No, I’m going to marry a don“ is her reply (p. 138) . „I will be what I become, I suppose“. She would certainly like to be „high-powered“ (p. 96). 

The author herself said that she started writing because „writing was such a convenient career to combine with having a family“. As the mother of three children, I can’t imagine this as an option, unless a lot of help at home is available to an aspiring female writer. 

While the focus is on the women, a variety of male characters play their roles. Stephen Halifax is boring, nasty, snobbish and cruel, according to his wife. John Connell, a he-man, is, it seems, in love with Louise but plays an awkward role. Gill’s husband Tony is inconsiderate, self-centred, attracted during his separation to „silly girls“, while Gill was „the traditional university woman, badly dressed, censorious and chaotic“ (p. 76). There are a couple of more chivalrous and kind men (Jackie Almond, Wilfred Smee). It will be interesting to see how men are portrayed in the following novels. 

Questioning educated women’s role in society, considering their options, describing unhappy circumstances following early marriage all point to Drabble being associated with the “fledgling years of feminism, as she was one of the most assiduous chroniclers of female experience in Britain during that time” (as Lisa Allardice writes in The Guardian, June 2011).