Books The women who made TS Eliot Accounts of the poet’s brutal rejections of Mary Trevelyan and Emily Hale shed light on a man obsessed by posterity and guilt. By Margaret Drabble
The road not taken: Margaret Drabble on the appeals of an underwater life When I was at university I passionately wanted to be an actor, and for some years struggled to find… By Margaret Drabble
The night that changed my life: Margaret Drabble on Watching Pirandello on TV in 1954 I felt I was entering the adult world. By Margaret Drabble
Annie Ernaux: the objective, unseen reporter of her times Ernaux’s The Years draws not only on her own life but on her long “communal memory”. By Margaret Drabble
Girls’ schools and Gothic: inside the dark and dreamlike world of Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy Jaeggy writes powerfully of communities of adolescent girls: stagnant, hothouse worlds of spying and crushes. By Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble: Why I was wrong about Georges Perec It took me a long time to get to grips with Perec, but I'm glad I did. By Margaret Drabble
Theatrical knotweed: Margaret Drabble journeys around Shakespeare’s globe It is hard to characterise Andrew Dickson’s Worlds Elsewhere – it is a discursive, rambling, global volume. By Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble: what kind of a feminist is Elena Ferrante? The Story of the Lost Child is the final instalment in a literary phenomenon. But what does its elusive author really believe? By Margaret Drabble
Submarine dreams: Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas The classic sci-fi novel is more than a ripping yarn – it anticipated the ecology movement and shaped the French avant-garde. By Margaret Drabble