Book review: A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, The Complete Stories

Though best known as one of Britain's most acclaimed novelists, Margaret Drabble is also the author of 13 short stories, which are often overlooked because they have largely appeared in journals and magazines, around the world. Collected in one volume for the first time, this tasty baker's dozen is presented in order of publication, and span almost her entire career, dating from 1966 up to 2000.

In his informative but gushing introduction, Jose Francisco Fernandez calls Drabble's early stories "so very English". I'd been thinking old-fashioned, but in this case, those phrases are synonymous. He means that they depict England as it was after the war, struggling to get back on its feet, trying to make sense of vastly changed social mores and class hierarchies, and to rethink the role women would play in this brave new world. For me, there was something dated about the cadences and characters in Drabble's earliest stories, though on reflection the themes - adultery recurs frequently - are as modern as anything.

In the oldest story, "Hassan's Tower", Drabble needs only a few lines to precisely describe mismatched newlyweds so tangled up in the perceived requirements of good behaviour that they're unable to enjoy a simple drink together while sunning on a Moroccan terrace. You can read the story of their entire life to come in those tense, resentful lines. For his part, the husband suffers intensely from class guilt, but while he's unwilling to get his hands dirty, he's equally unwilling to pay someone to perform those sullying tasks. The concept couldn't be more current - just think about those complaining that immigrants are taking jobs from the British, while shunning that same employment as beneath them.

Drabble keeps her protagonists on the move, sending them to Morocco, Somerset, Italy, Elba and Turkey, but as the saying goes, everywhere they go, there they are. They cannot escape themselves, though they do, sometimes, manage transformative moments of transcendence, notably in "The Caves of God", and "Stepping Westward".

"The Caves of God", published in 1999, tells of Hannah Elsevir, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist who happens upon a reference to her long-lost, first ex-husband in a biography and is undone by it. Obsessed, and deluding herself about the reasons why, she deliberately undermines her scientific reputation and hunts him down, finding him in a remote village in Turkey. It's a beautiful exploration of obsession that reaches a surprising conclusion.

"Stepping Westward", published in 2000, is replete with descriptions of the Somerset countryside lavish enough to evoke comparisons to Patrick Leigh Fermor. Like "Caves", it finds schoolteacher Mary Mogg on a journey to reconnect, albeit figuratively, with a past love - or more likely, the girl she was when she loved, who had an intense link to Wordsworth and his centuries-earlier perambulations. On her trip she meets a lichenologist who takes her mind off of poetry and fixes it on the fine art of seeing the forest for the trees - which is magic enough to refresh and renew Mary's outlook on life.

The later stories are my favourites, but the most haunting is from 1973, long before the phrase "work/life balance" was coined, and gives the anthology its title . In "A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman", beautiful Jenny Jamieson lands a job in TV through nepotism, but proves herself immensely good at it - so charming, so capable, and so well loved.

Unappreciated by her husband, whose career nosedives as hers soars, she wakes one day to find she's unable to smile benignly at fools, or keep herself from screaming in frustration. But women like Jenny do pull themselves together, no matter what. On the day in question, that "what" includes a painful gynaecological examination that leaves her battered and fearing for her life.

Not one to let the side down, she delivers a promised speech to a girl's school assembly while giving a silent prayer of thanks that the blood running down her legs will pool in her boots, and not alarm the teenagers. "For twenty minutes, she spoke and bled," is Drabble's chilling, unforgettable summation.

Fernandez argues persuasively for the need for a definitive assessment of Drabble's place in the literary pantheon, and why it must begin with these stories. This is a great introduction for anyone unfamiliar with Drabble's work, and a must-have for diehard fans, as well.