- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (11 Mar 1982)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140057455
- ISBN-13: 978-0140057454
- Product Dimensions: 17.6 x 10.8 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 643,396 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| ||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Kate Armstrong has many roles: mother, ex-wife, daughter, friend, betrayed lover. Her career as a journalist makes her a spokeswoman of many women. But her home life, career and a host of emotional demands are obscuring the future. As time passes, bringing both joys and crises, the picture clears.
About the Author
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire in 1939, and is the younger sister of A.S. Byatt. Margaret's novel THE MILLSTONE won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize and she was granted a Society of Author's Travelling Fellowship in the mid-1960's. She received the James Tait Black and the E.M. Forster awards, and was awarded the CBE in 1980. She has three children and lives in London with her second husband, biographer Michael Holroyd.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Margaret Drabble's "The Middle Ground" is a novel about nothing, and everything. The story takes places over a two month period of time, coupled with extensive flashbacks. Although some readers may initially be put off by the lack of a linear narrative, it will be difficult to dismiss the book entirely as one becomes caught up in the character's lives.
Although Kate Armstrong seems to be the main character, she is accompanied by a strong group of potential main characters: her friends Evelyn and Hugo, her ex-lover Ted- who just happens to be Evelyn's husband, her houseguest Mujid, and her children.
The books explores amoung other things, issues central to modern day society:, rascism, class structures, and feminism. Kate's ambivilant attitude to her own status as a writer of women's fiction is a fascinating examination of both the positive and negative effects of the "women liberation movement."
"The Middle Ground" is a book not just about these characters but is also self consciously about how to write a book about such characters. The novel constantly asks the reader to question the reliability of any of the narratives he or she is reading. It calls into question our ideas about truth and fiction by telling us for example that we are hearing only one possible account of Kate's life in which some things will be highlighted and others omitted.
Drabble's writing while realistically depicting the lives of her characters is also infused with a humour that makes her a delight to read.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a massively assured and competent novel from a woman who has been writing since the late sixties and never fails to find something interesting to say. She has slipped from the top-twenty of novelists (if there is such a thing) and might now be considered someone who has had her day, but I find her bracing and salutary. She was in the forefront of novelists who could write about people with the deep interest and compassion that they deserved, but she never had much truck with `story' which has become newly fashionable. Story was always secondary to `condition of life' in her long series of novels about human relationships that ran from the late sixties to the late eighties and beyond.
Though such distinctions are often artificial, they come to the fore when thinking about what she writes. Here it is mostly about Kate - a charming, attractive, but rather undisciplined woman. Her marriage is a disaster and her affair with the husband of a friend doesn't turn out much better, but she manages to raise three children, give a temporary home to a number of misfits and social outcasts, as well as take lovers, though much good that does her. She is renowned for her successful parties and she has a newly warming relationship with an old friend, Hugo. Kate also holds down a job as a radical campaigning journalist and is liked by almost everyone. Emotionally intelligent, reliable and great fun, she nevertheless has her dark moments and Drabble is successful in bringing out the nuances of the complex and interesting character of her protagonist.
I rather disapprove, however, of Drabble's insistence of foregrounding the author (...and here we will leave her... and the like). This seems to have no effect other than a way to let the author move on - but it reads as lazy and is sometimes distracting - is this a novel or just Margaret Drabble's book of gossip? Why not just cut the scene and move to the next?
This is a good novel, analysing a certain kind of bohemian version of a successful life available to the middle class men and women the writer so obviously knows very well.
Though such distinctions are often artificial, they come to the fore when thinking about what she writes. Here it is mostly about Kate - a charming, attractive, but rather undisciplined woman. Her marriage is a disaster and her affair with the husband of a friend doesn't turn out much better, but she manages to raise three children, give a temporary home to a number of misfits and social outcasts, as well as take lovers, though much good that does her. She is renowned for her successful parties and she has a newly warming relationship with an old friend, Hugo. Kate also holds down a job as a radical campaigning journalist and is liked by almost everyone. Emotionally intelligent, reliable and great fun, she nevertheless has her dark moments and Drabble is successful in bringing out the nuances of the complex and interesting character of her protagonist.
I rather disapprove, however, of Drabble's insistence of foregrounding the author (...and here we will leave her... and the like). This seems to have no effect other than a way to let the author move on - but it reads as lazy and is sometimes distracting - is this a novel or just Margaret Drabble's book of gossip? Why not just cut the scene and move to the next?
This is a good novel, analysing a certain kind of bohemian version of a successful life available to the middle class men and women the writer so obviously knows very well.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
A modern Dickens
5 Mar 2011
Format:Mass Market Paperback
The Middle Ground is another great novel from Margaret Drabble. I guess the title refers to that period in a person's life when the weight and seeming responsibilities of youth have been seen to be what they are: youthful egocentrism and arrogance. To come to that realization is both a release and a challenge: where do we go from here?
Kate Armstrong has reached thst point in her life. The mother of three children, she feels that men are impossible, and yet: "They (she and her ex lover)would gaze at one another forever, good friends perhaps, old allies, old enemies,across this impossible void...trying new voices, new gestures, making true efforts to hear, to listen, to understand.But hopelessly, hopelessly. Admit defeat....men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language.But are compelled forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace." (P 236).
She looks back on the frustrations of a stultifying upbringing; she copes in the present with the difficulties of her complicated life in London in the 1980's; and when we leave her she's sitting on her bed, wondering what to wear, excitedly anticipating a party to which too many people have been invited, at which things can, and probably will, go wrong.She is bravely facing an unknown future, and this reader, for one, feels emboldened by her example in this wonderful, life-affirming novel.
Kate Armstrong has reached thst point in her life. The mother of three children, she feels that men are impossible, and yet: "They (she and her ex lover)would gaze at one another forever, good friends perhaps, old allies, old enemies,across this impossible void...trying new voices, new gestures, making true efforts to hear, to listen, to understand.But hopelessly, hopelessly. Admit defeat....men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language.But are compelled forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace." (P 236).
She looks back on the frustrations of a stultifying upbringing; she copes in the present with the difficulties of her complicated life in London in the 1980's; and when we leave her she's sitting on her bed, wondering what to wear, excitedly anticipating a party to which too many people have been invited, at which things can, and probably will, go wrong.She is bravely facing an unknown future, and this reader, for one, feels emboldened by her example in this wonderful, life-affirming novel.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
An English Women of Lower Class Origins Who's Finally Made It
18 May 2009
Format:Mass Market Paperback
I am surprised that there are no other reviews of this novel. Margaret Drabble is an English writer who has written several novels. I am a fan of Ms. Drabbles' work and enjoyed this novel very much.
It is about an English woman who is somewhat 'hip', of lower class origins, who has finally made it. There is a lot of character analysis of her, along with her friends and lovers and their intermingling lives. The book is fun and very readable.
It is about an English woman who is somewhat 'hip', of lower class origins, who has finally made it. There is a lot of character analysis of her, along with her friends and lovers and their intermingling lives. The book is fun and very readable.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
