A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories - Hardcover

Praise for Margaret Drabble

“Reading Margaret Drabble’s novels has become something of a rite of passage . . . [They are] sharply observed, exquisitely companionable tales of women of a certain age and class, educated, egocentric, strong, unlucky in love.”—Washington Post

“Gorgeous writing . . . [Drabble’s] flawed and oh-so-human characters appall and enthrall.”—Boston Globe

“As meticulous as Jane Austen, and as deadly as Evelyn Waugh.”—Los Angeles Times

“Margaret Drabble will have done for late-twentieth-century London what Dickens did for Victorian London.”—New York Times

“The intensity, the seriousness, the playfulness—I loved, and still love, these characteristics of Drabble’s work, as I do the sense of a writer continually interrogating the nature of the world, and of our place in it.”—Andrea Barrett

Margaret Drabble’s novels have illuminated the past fifty years, especially the changing lives of women, like no others. Yet her short fiction, never before collected, has its own unique brilliance. Her penetrating evocations of character and place, her wide-ranging curiosity, her sense of irony, all are on display here in stories that explore marriage, female friendships, the English tourist abroad, love affairs with houses, peace demonstrations, gin and tonics, cultural TV programs—stories that are perceptive, sharp, and funny. An introduction by the scholar José Fernández ably places the stories in the context of Drabble’s life and her novels. This collection is a wonderful recapitulation of a masterly career.