A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman – review round-up

Margaret Drabble has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a novelist and biographer. But do her short stories match the standard of her other work?
 
Stevie Davies, in the Independent, certainly thinks so. He confesses to having been ‘desperately moved’ by the collection. In it, she argues, ‘Drabble exposes and anatomises the tissue of women’s private pains, shames and fears.’ Similarly, her use of the short story form is notable: both ‘the form’s power of ambivalence and understatement, its canny and cunning obliquities’ and her use of its ‘miniscule and transient shifts of perception’ contribute to the elegiac tone. And, for some of the stories, this delicious ambiguity emerges as the overriding theme. As she puts it: ‘the enigma stays with us.’
 
In the Sunday Times, Lindsay Duguid argues (£) that the short stories ‘offer a sampler of her particular concerns.’ Englishness is a major concern as is the dialectic of the ‘daily grind…juxtaposed with a hazier vision of escape.’