| Post-World War II British novelist Margaret Drabble has drawn from life and literature to create a new heroine to guide women of the late twentieth century. Her female characters combine education, careers, and motherhood, with the family as the empowering center of their lives. Her reality-based model for modern, middle-class women is her own, positive version of the Angel in the House, the nineteenth-century term that Drabble uses in several novels. Drabble's Angel-in-the-House characters of all ages illustrate how women help stabilize society through their work done outside the home and within the home in creating strong families.; Because as a scholar, Drabble sees connections between a writer's life and work, this dissertation will explore connections between Drabble and her work. She views these connections as important in her novels. Since Drabble follows the realist novel tradition, especially as established by women writers of the nineteenth century, and since her writing is grounded in traditional methods of analysis, this dissertation will be grounded in a traditional thematic analysis of Drabble's novels and her new Angel-in-the-House creation.; This dissertation explores the evolution of Drabble's positive cultural icon of the Angel in the House. Drabble develops her female characters as mothers and maternal persons. Yet, Drabble continues striving for women's rights by incorporating the next logical step to the work of her nineteenth-century literary predecessors, such as Jane Austen and George Eliot, showing a woman who can seek an education and work outside the home as well as within the home to make a good life for her family. Drabble's middle-class British heroine is an educated woman who holds mothering as supreme and who is an extremely capable manager of home as well as of other aspects of life. |
