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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2004, 352 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2005, 348 pages
'With her usual deftness and clarity, Drabble crosses cultures and centuries...engrossing and provocative'.
Barbara Halliwell, on a grant at Oxford, receives an
unexpected package-a memoir by a Korean crown princess, written more
than two hundred years ago. A highly appropriate gift for her impending
trip to Seoul. But from whom?
The story she avidly reads on the plane turns out to be one of great
intrigue as well as tragedy. The Crown Princess Hyegyong recounts in
extraordinary detail the ways of the Korean court and confesses the
family dramas that left her childless and her husband dead by his own
hand. Perhaps it is the loss of a child that resonates so deeply with
Barbara . . . but she has little time to think of such things, she has
just arrived in Korea.
She meets a certain Dr. Oo, and to her surprise and delight he offers to
guide her to some of the haunts of the crown princess. As she explores
the inner sanctums and the royal courts, Barbara begins to feel a strong
affinity for everything related to the princess and her mysterious life.
After a brief, intense, and ill-fated love affair, she returns to
London. Is she ensnared by the events of the past week, of the past two
hundred years, or will she pick up her life where she left it? A
beautifully told and ingeniously constructed novel, this is Margaret
Drabble at her best.
Excerpt
The Red Queen
WHEN I WAS A LITTLE CHILD, I pined for a red silk skirt. I do not remember all the emotions of my childhood, but I remember this childish longing well. One of my many cousins came to visit us when I was five years old, and she had a skirt of red silk with patterned edgings, lined with a plain red silk of a slightly darker shade. It was very fashionable, and very beautiful. The gauzy texture was at once soft and stiff, and the colour was bold. Woven into it was a design of little summer flowers and butterflies, all in red. I loved it and I fingered it. That skirt spoke to my girlish heart. I wanted one like it, but I knew that my family was not as wealthy as my mother's sister's family, so I checked my desire, although I can see now that my mother and my aunt could read the longing in my eyes. My aunt and my cousins were delicate in their tastes, and like most women of that era, like most women of any era, they liked fine clothes. They came to...
Margaret Drabble was born in 1939 in Sheffield, England. Her father was a barrister, county court judge and a novelist, and her sister is the author A.S. Byatt. She attended the Mount School in York from where she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge to read English. She received a double first. After graduating from Cambridge she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford where she understudied for Vanessa Redgrave. She married the actor Clive Swift in 1960 and had three children. Following a divorce in 1975 she married Michael Holroyd in the early 1980s. The live in London and Somerset (South-East England).
She is the author of at least 16 novels and a range of non-fiction. Browse her complete bibliography at the ...
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