North and South: Margaret Drabble's 'Jerusalem the Golden' and 'The Radiant Way'

This dissertation focuses on two novels which are representative of Margaret Drabble's most powerful fiction: Jerusalem the Golden (1967) and The Radiant Way (1987). Both novels show the importance of Drabble's roots in the North of England and, in addition, the vital significance of folklore and fable in shaping the childhood imagination. Drabble's work has been powerfully influenced by her childhood in Sheffield, Yorkshire, in the North of England. This is an area to which she has repeatedly returned in non-fiction works such as A Writer's Britain and Arnold Bennett: A Biography, and, even more significantly, in her novels.; It is in the novels that Drabble invokes the childhood fairy tales by which her consciousness was shaped, only to transcend the archetypes presented for women in these stories by showing how strong, self-actualized women can write their own scripts after returning to the scenes of their childhood and confronting their pasts. In doing so, Drabble creates female protagonists who are more reminiscent of the powerful women of an earlier, northern folk tale tradition than those of tale-tellers such as Charles Perrault.; Drabble's northern childhood is a wellspring from which she has drawn repeatedly. Her work is strengthened by the tension that exists between North and South, the North of her childhood and the South of her own intellectual and academic success; this tension is vividly reflected in the lives of Clara Maugham of Jerusalem the Golden and Liz Headleand of The Radiant Way.