A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)

Margaret Drabble is one of the major literary figures of her generation. In this collection of her complete short fiction from across four decades, she examines the intense private worlds and passions of everyday people.

From one man's honeymooning epiphany in 'Hassan's Tower' to the journeying fantasies of 'A Voyage to Cythera', and from the sharp joy of 'The Merry Widow' to the bloody reality of the collection's title story, these are moving, witty and provocative tales, exploring cruel and loving relationships, social change and personal obsessions, and confirming her status as a leading practitioner of the art of the short story.

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