Volume 48, Number 11 · July 5, 2001
Escape!
By Gabriele Annan
The Peppered Moth
Margaret Drabble
Harcourt, 369 pp., $25.00
The Peppered Moth is part fact, part fiction—'the later parts of the story are entirely fictitious.' It is the story of four generations of women. Margaret Drabble's grandmother belongs to the first, her mother to the second, she herself to the third, and her daughter to the fourth. The chief character, though, is her mother, called Bessie Bawtry in the novel. In an apologetic afterword, Drabble explains that her dead mother haunts her, and that friends—'mostly novelist friends'—suggested she write a novel about her: 'Maybe I should have tried to write a factual memoir of her life,' she says ruefully, 'but I have written this instead.' In doing so, she found herself being 'harsh, dismissive, censorious. As [her mother] was.'
Review, 2290 words
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