Margaret Drabble is the author of ‘A Summer Bird Cage’
Michael Holroyd, the biographer, says his wife Margaret Drabble’s ongoing feud with her sister A S Byatt is a ‘tragedy’.
By Tim Walker. Edited by Richard Eden
Margaret Drabble and A S Byatt are the contemporary literary world’s most prominent sisters. Their ongoing feud is, however, the cause of much sadness for Drabble’s husband, the distinguished biographer Sir Michael Holroyd.
“They had a very difficult upbringing with their mother,” he tells Mandrake. “They cannot help that. It is a fact. They’ve had two extraordinary careers and are not dependent on any shadow that their mother laid on both of them to achieve. She had her reasons; she was not at all well. It’s a sort of tragedy.”
Dame Margaret, 73, has been estranged from her elder sister, Dame Antonia Duffy, who writes as A S Byatt, since they were children. “There was too much competition,” Byatt has said of the cause; their upbringing made it that way.
Drabble’s novels include A Summer Bird Cage and The Witch of Exmoor, while Byatt, 76, won the Booker Prize with her 1990 book Possession.
In 2011, Drabble said of the dispute: “It’s irresoluble now. It’s sad, but beyond repair, and I don’t think about it much any more.”
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