Clara has broken away from the stifling respectability of her northern home to live her own life in London. Through her close friendship with Celia Denham she enters a world of dazzling educated people and wealthy bohemians. Clara yearns to be part of their constellation.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
An extraordinary work The New York Times Like Doris Lessing, that genius of the forcefully "creating" work of fiction, Miss Drabble presents characters who are not passively witnessing their lives (and ours); she is not a writer who reflects the helplessness of the stereotyped "sick society," but one who has taken upon herself the task, largely ignored today, of attempting the active, vital, energetic, mysterious re-creation of a set of values by which human beings can live -- Joyce Carol Oates Drabble excels at describing the minute detail of human behaviour Independent
About the Author
Margaret Drabble was born in 1939 in Sheffield, Yorkshire, the daughter of barrister and novelist John F. Drabble, and sister of novelist A.S. Byatt. She is the author of seventeen novels and eight works of non-fiction, including biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. In 1980, Margaret Drabble was made a CBE and in 2008 she was made DBE. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd, and lives in London and Somerset.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Margaret Drabble is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle's Eye, among other novels. She has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and she is the editor of the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If it were published today...,
This review is from: Jerusalem the Golden (Paperback)
This short novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1967. I hope that if it were published today, it would win the same prize or some similarly august accolade. It is a straight forward narrative account of a Clara, a girl from a town in northern England who moves to London to study French. Borne of an overbearing, negative mother, she feels she has never really connected with life. With good looks and native cleverness, though, she has always felt some greater destiny in store for herself.
She gains access to a richer, more complicated world of brilliance and relationships when she becomes embroiled with a Bohemian London family of poets, artists, television producers and the like. She is first infatuated with the daughter, Clelia, who appears to be the most interesting person she has ever met. She soon falls in love with Clelia's brother, Gabriel, and the climax of the story occurs in Paris, where a week has been stolen by the unhappily married Gabriel to spoil Clara. Although an illicit romance in Paris sounds anything but original, the book is full of original insights into a lifestyle and a type of person which lend themselves to fiction. And despite the very evident setting of the novel in 1966 or 1967 in London, the novel remains utterly applicable to middle class life in the English speaking nations of today. By the end of the novel we have come to know Clara. We see her stifling childhood along with the residual effects of her mother's suppression. We see Clara's tentative excursions into romance and finally her ascent from being an observer of life, to being a participant in life. I have not read all of Drabble's work, so I can't say this is her best. I can say that it is better writing than her more lauded early effort, The Millstone. I can also say that Drabble's wit is more acute here than in some of her later works, though I would strongly recommend The Red Queen. Jerusalem the Golden is not so great a work of fiction that one would insist people read as part of some canon of required literature, or anything like that. But it is high quality writing from one of Britain's most eminent authors. If you appreciate real literature which illuminates the inner lives of other consciousnesses, you will appreciate this relatively quick read.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent fiction, bizarrely out-of-print,
By A Customer
This review is from: Jerusalem the Golden (Plume) (Paperback)
It's so depressing that this book is out-of-print and that Amazon has used copies selling for ONE CENT!Horrible for me to see such an excellent novel so undervalued. Margaret Drabble's earlier novels are arguably better than her later work...simply because they are relatively straightforward stories, told with great intelligence, and not clotted by the excessive "ambition" of her later work. Please seek this book out, as well as another early novel, A Summer Bird Cage. I promise you you'll love them.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Listmania!
|
|
