Dame Margaret Drabble and Sir Michael Holroyd (by Richard Thomas)

Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd will feature as a double bill at our meeting on Friday 15 May.  They are husband and wife, but appear together at literary events only rarely, so we are doubly lucky.  The title of their joint talk, “Facts and Fictions”, is a nod towards the main drift of their respective oeuvres, as Dame Margaret is best known as a novelist, while Sir Michael is probably the doyen of the country’s literary biographers. But in fact both of them have written books outside their main fields.  As well as her eighteen novels, Drabble has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, critical studies of Wordsworth and Hardy, a volume of short stories, a memoir incorporating a history of jigsaws, a geographic account of literary Britain, and many other works.  And of course she has edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and in doing so brought that venerable work of reference back to life.

Holroyd is best known, and deservedly so, for his biographies, on Lytton Strachey, Augustus John, George Bernard Shaw, and one jointly on Ellen Terry and Henry Irving.  His first biography was on a “local boy”, the critic Hugh Kingsmill, who lived much of his life in Hastings.  He has also written a loosely connected series of three semi-autobiographical memoirs, Basil Street Blues, Mosaic and A Book of Secrets, as well as a fond memoir about a number of cars and their owners, On Wheels.  For years it was assumed that he was not a novelist, and never would be.  But this was not in fact so.  He did in fact publish a novel, A Dog’s Life, in the Sixties, but it appeared only in the USA until, at long last, it came out in the UK a few months ago.  Holroyd had shown the manuscript to his father, who had taken exception to it, so publication in the UK, planned also for the Sixties, was suspended.

Drabble was educated at The Mount, the venerable Quaker school in York, before Cambridge, where she took a starred First, before embarking on a career as an actress, during which she met and married the actor Clive Swift.  They had three children: Oxford academic Adam, TV gardening guru Joe, and literary consultant Rebecca.  The marriage was dissolved, and she married Holroyd in 1982.  She wrote her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, while she was pregnant.  It was a great success, so she forsook the theatre for a full time writing career.  She has two sisters, the novelist  A S Byatt and the art historian Helen Langdon.  Her brother Richard is a leading QC.

Holroyd claims the Maidenhead Public Library as his alma mater, after schooling at Eton.  His father was the head of Lalique Glass’s British operations, and his mother, many times married, was Swedish.

Both Holroyd and Drabble are much involved in literary organisations, including PEN, the Society of Authors, and the RSL, all three of which Holroyd has chaired.  They have both been awarded a number of major literary prizes.  They live in London and Somerset.