"A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman"

The English writer Margaret Drabble is best known for her many novels written over a long career, several of which I have read and enjoyed. She is also a biographer of writers and a scholar of English literature. She has written far less short fiction, but readers are fortunate that the short stories she has written have been collected in a new book, “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Most of Drabble’s fiction, long and short, focuses on women characters, usually professional women in England. The stories are feminist in a non-explicit, non-didactic, moderate, English way. In this collection, most of the main characters are working through some issue or conflict, often related to being a woman in today’s world, and trying to understand their own feelings about the issue at hand. For example: How does it feel when your verbally cruel husband dies, and is it OK that your main feeling is relief and freedom? How does it feel when you think you might be dying, and you are so afraid for your young children to experience their mother’s death and absence? How does it feel to be so in love with a house and a way of life that you don’t care which man you have to marry to get it? How does it feel to allow your imagination to get too involved in the affairs of a man you met briefly on a train, and what does it mean that you allowed this to happen? How does it feel to be involved in a long term affair but know that you will never be able to be together more than the occasional meeting or brief vacation? How does it feel to break someone’s heart without even realizing you are doing it? The reader cannot help getting involved in these situations and dilemmas. And, as it perhaps goes without saying for a writer of Drabble’s stature, the writing is quietly assured and quite beautiful. I have the feeling that Drabble isn’t as well known in the U.S. as she should be; readers who have not read her work, please consider doing so; this collection of stories would be a good place to start.