Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer, one of three very clever daughters of very clever parents,

she went like her mother and sisters to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she graduated with a

starred first. Her immediate ambition was to be an actress and indeed she did

join the Royal Shakespeare Company, but her first novel a summer bird cage had

been published, it was a triumph, and then another and then a prize winner the Millstone.

There followed a steady stream of subtle stylish books firmly rooted in her own experiences,

motherhood, divorce, families, English society in the late 20th century. Establish now as one of our most

important modern writers she's pleased to have reached a wide audience. I've been

lucky she says. I seem to have struck subjects which got into people's minds so I've

had a larger audience than I might have had she is Margaret Drabble I can't

really believe Margaret that you put your success down to luck? I think I was writing in a

very fortunate period that there seemed to be a lot of women like me who were

discovering the same kind of problems, the same kind of doors were opening for them.

So I came to feel that I was writing for a generation and having been quite lonely and

feeling that my experience was isolated I realized that it did link up with a lot of other people.

So your luck was timing really? It was the timing of the century really in the early 60s

the women's movement hadn't really got going, but obviously the people who were going to move

within it were already thinking the things that they were thinking.

And of course it was very avant-garde to discuss abortion at the stage that you did in the millstone, which is, as we know about a young

girl who finds herself pregnant, she's unmarried and she does consider abortion and drinks

...