"Rather Dated" December: Margaret Drabble, A Summer Bird-Cage 📚

52 replies

frustratedacademic · 03/12/2022 11:27

Come and join the chat from over on the "Rather Dated" books thread (📚
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/what weree_reading/4624300-the-mumsnet-rather-dated-book-group-all-welcome-to-join📚), where we established that there's a thirst for reading books by women from the past 50 years or so that are too frequently written off as dated.

December's choice is Margaret Drabble's first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage. Feel free to jot your thoughts down here at any point this month.

Spoilers allowed, but not on the main thread please.

OP posts:

RoyalCorgi · 23/12/2022 15:00

StellaOlivetti · 10/12/2022 15:39

Whoever suggested this one, thank you! Was a delight to re read after nearly 40 years. I was surprised by how much I remembered… not the plot so much (not much happens, after all) but little phrases or observations: buying English chocolate on the way back across the channel, and French on the way out, Daphne having to put things on rather than take them off to look better, Louise spoiling the effect of her pale make up with dramatic lipstick. Lots more, that I’d remembered for years. In terms of being rather dated, I think the whole concept of the book was based on looking at the options available to educated young women at the time, and like a previous poster said, it is worlds away from my own experience as a new graduate only twenty years later. Awful marriage to rich unlikeable man (Louise) drab and comfortless flat sharing and pointless job (Sarah) earnest political activism (?Stephanie), wandering round Europe looking at art by yourself (Simone) … none of the options sound much fun. I am not sure that young graduate women today experience the need to choose a life pathway in quite the same stark way that Sarah does in the book.
I read somewhere that Margaret Drabble regretted how much emphasis she put on clothes and appearance in the book, which is probably due to the fact that she was a young writer writing about young women, and I have to say I like this book and her other early novels much more than her later ones. The other dated thing, which made me smile, was when Sarah said that she hoped they never build a tunnel under the channel because she likes the ferry so much.
All in all, I loved it! Going to track down a copy of The Garrick year now.

I really enjoyed your post, because A Summer Bird Cage was one of my favourite books when I was younger, and I've read it many many times. The bits you mentioned are all things that have stayed with me too. There's a whole load of other things as well, like the friend whose marriage breaks up and has the miserable abortion experience, and the way Sarah's boyfriend apparently tells her her nipples are like jelly babies, the fact that Louise's husband is so wealthy she is able to keep her cosmetics in nameless jars, the au pair who cries near the beginning, the way that Sarah gets her bottom pinched on the Metro in France. Also Louise telling Sarah the story about the steeple at Chesterfield (have I remembered that right?) which is twisted because it turned around to see a virgin getting married in the church, and would turn around again if it ever saw another one. There's a bit where she talks about "taking" a job at the BBC because she can't think of anything else to do, as if this was the easiest thing in the world rather than something most of us would strive for and probably never attain. So many memorable little details. She builds up such a vivid picture of a particular time and place. I was a teenager when I first read it, and it felt so exotic to me, as someone who came from a lower social class and was timid and unglamorous. (And still am!)

Buttalapasta · 17/01/2023 20:08

I’m a bit late to the discussion but I just finished this. It was a strange one for me as I hadn’t read it before and couldn’t really identify with the characters. For some reason they seemed more distant and different than in many books that I have read set much earlier. Perhaps it is the Oxbridge thing. But not just that. The whole attitude towards relationships seemed so alien to me. Her "fiance" was distant both geographically and emotionally and yet, this didn’t seem to matter to either of them. Moving on to The Beautiful Visit which so far I am enjoying much more.

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