The Seven Sisters - Hardcover

Drabble, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151007403 ISBN 13: 9780151007400

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002

Synopsis

Divorced and estranged from her grown daughters, Candida Wilton moves to a run-down flat well below her means and finds exhilaration in her self-imposed poverty, during which she confides her thoughts to a computer and makes friends with new peers. Reader's Guide available. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Authors

Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield, England, in 1939 and read English at Cambridge University. She is the author of many novels and the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She lives in London.

Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield, England, in 1939 and read English at Cambridge University. She is the author of many novels and the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She lives in London.

From the Back Cover

Praise for The Peppered Moth:

"One of the more absorbing novels I have read in a long time, both for its sheer storytelling ability and for its powers of imaginative conjecture." --The New York Times Book Review

"This book fairly bounces. Its zest dervies in large part from the perfectly sustained tone, which expresses humor without poking fun, and deep regret without sentimentality." --The Atlantic Monthly

"The realistic novel, Drabble forcefully demonstrates, retains its ability to comment powerfully on our lives and engage our emotions deeply." --The Washington Post Book World

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Praise for The Peppered Moth:

"One of the more absorbing novels I have read in a long time, both for its sheer storytelling ability and for its powers of imaginative conjecture." --The New York Times Book Review

"This book fairly bounces. Its zest dervies in large part from the perfectly sustained tone, which expresses humor without poking fun, and deep regret without sentimentality." --The Atlantic Monthly

"The realistic novel, Drabble forcefully demonstrates, retains its ability to comment powerfully on our lives and engage our emotions deeply." --The Washington Post Book World

From the Inside Flap

From the celebrated author of The Peppered Moth and The Witch of Exmoor, a splendid novel about starting over late in life

Candida Wilton-a woman recently betrayed, rejected, divorced, and alienated from her three grown daughters-moves from a beautiful Georgian house in lovely Suffolk to a two-room walk-up flat in a run-down building in central London. Candida is not exactly destitute. So is the move perversity, she wonders, a survival test, or is she punishing herself? How will she adjust to this shabby, menacing, but curiously appealing city? What can happen, at her age, to change her life? And yet, as she climbs the dingy communal staircase with her suitcases, she feels both nervous and exhilarated.
There is a relationship with a computer to which she now confides her past and her present. And friendships of sorts with other women - widows, divorced, never married, women straddled between generations. And then Candida's surprise inheritance...
A beautifully rendered story, this is Margaret Drabble at her novelistic best.

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From the celebrated author of The Peppered Moth and The Witch of Exmoor, a splendid novel about starting over late in life

Candida Wilton-a woman recently betrayed, rejected, divorced, and alienated from her three grown daughters-moves from a beautiful Georgian house in lovely Suffolk to a two-room walk-up flat in a run-down building in central London. Candida is not exactly destitute. So is the move perversity, she wonders, a survival test, or is she punishing herself? How will she adjust to this shabby, menacing, but curiously appealing city? What can happen, at her age, to change her life? And yet, as she climbs the dingy communal staircase with her suitcases, she feels both nervous and exhilarated.
There is a relationship with a computer to which she now confides her past and her present. And friendships of sorts with other women - widows, divorced, never married, women straddled between generations. And then Candida's surprise inheritance...
A beautifully rendered story, this is Margaret Drabble at her novelistic best.

Reviews

The narrator of Drabble's teasingly clever new novel, like several of her fictional predecessors (in The Witch of Endor and The Peppered Moth) is a lonely, middle-aged woman disillusioned with her life and wary about her future. Betrayed and divorced by her husband, the smug headmaster of a school in Suffolk, and estranged from her three grown daughters, Candida Wilton moves to a flat in a rundown, slightly dangerous London neighborhood. To fill her days, she takes a class in Virgil, until the adult-ed building is taken over by a health club, which she joins for lack of anything better to do. The first section of the narrative is Candida's computer diary, in which she tries to make sense of the circumstances that have led her to this narrow place in her life, and her tentative efforts to reach out and make new friends. Though she apologizes for "the bleating, whining, resentful, martyred tone I seem to have adopted," Candida's account has the fresh veracity of someone who's a newcomer to London and to the state of being single. While Drabble paints her as sexually cold and maternally reserved, given to French phrases and snobbish assessments, Candida is a character the reader grudgingly admires as she tries to maintain hope that she can turn her life around. Then a small miracle occurs. A financial windfall allows her to take some of her fellow Virgil aficionados and two old friends on a trip to Tunis and Sicily, following the footsteps of Aeneas. Candida learns more about her companions as the trip progresses and gains some insights into her own behavior. The narrative takes several surprising turns, throwing the reader as off-center as Candida has become and proving that Candida herself has not been candid. But Drabble has: Candida's evasive account accurately charts the psychological territory of one who is suddenly cast adrift.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Drabble returns with another novel featuring an intelligent woman facing late middle age alone. Like the protagonists of The Peppered Moth and The Witch of Exmoor, Candida Wilton finds herself in a sad predicament partially of her own making. Although the divorce following her headmaster husband's betrayal was shattering, Candida's subsequent estrangement from her daughters has roots in her rather cold personality, and it was wholly her choice to move from her Suffolk home to a seedy section of London. Naturally reserved and more than a little snobbish, she nevertheless struggles to build a new life, recording her progress in a laptop computer diary (in which Candida reveals herself as the least candid of narrators). A sudden change in finances sends Candida to Tunisia and Italy, following the journeys of Virgil's Aeneas in the company of six spiritual "sisters," which leads to unexpected plot twists. The author's clever observations and well-crafted prose move the narrative along and manage to sustain reader interest in, and even arouse sympathy for, a character who describes herself accurately as having "much to be ashamed about." For most fiction collections.
--Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Drabble's shrewd and charming diarist-narrator escaped the prison of her unhappy marriage after the death of a student led to exposure of her head-master husband's affair with the girl's mother. Candida chooses not to stay in Suffolk and strangle in the web of gossip but rather to purchase a condo in a not altogether safe yet intriguingly multicultural London neighborhood. There she determinedly explores her new world and signs up for a class on Virgil's Aeneid. When the College for Further Education is transformed into a health club, she misses Virgil and the simpatico company of her fellow students and instructor. So she reconvenes the group, adds two demanding friends from her previous life, and convinces "the seven sisters" to embark on a pilgrimage to retrace the steps Virgil took in his tracking of Aeneas. And what a transforming journey it is. Drabble's prose is lustrous and enchanting, and her play on classical themes adds dimension to her discerning assessment of our digitized, global society, and the metamorphosis of a woman poised not for the expected capitulation to age and isolation but, rather, for splendid renewal. As in The Witch of Exmoor (1997) and The Peppered Moth [BKL F 15 01], Drabble creates a subversively witty novel that rivals works by Anita Brookner, Margaret Atwood, and Penelope Lively. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151007403
• ISBN 13: 9780151007400
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320