The Millstone, by Margaret Drabble

pro-natal feminism and influencing Sally Rooney

This is a Bildungsroman of sorts, about the way becoming a mother changes a woman, makes her more assertive. The woman in question, Rosamund, is a hugely attractive character, but also unforgivably duplicitous. Drabble is expert at creating the conspiratorial sympathy necessary to tread the line between radical and conventional. The Millstone is often praised as feminist, but its pro-natalism, and discussion of abortion, would surely make it appealing to the revisionary feminists such as Louise Perry today.

Drabble said recently,

It is easier to cite women who have written openly about sex, sexual orientation, menstruation and abortion than those who have written positively about childbirth… I continue to be surprised by the fact that “the Nursing Madonna” was considered a wholly suitable subject for art, while breastfeeding is still hardly ever mentioned in literature. We continue to inhabit a world of paradoxical values, one in which books and babies are not yet entirely compatible.

In all of this, we can see Drabble as a major influence on Sally Rooney. Though Rooney had only read three Drabble novels by 2020, she has spoken about Drabble’s work with high praise, and that influence might be one of the reasons Beautiful World was so different from her first two books. The way Drabble combines the setting with the contents—so that The Millstone is essentially about what opinions are acceptable in your social group and how that affects the choices you make, or even consider—is where she is closest to Rooney. Both use a Jane Austen setting: a small group of people interacting with each other in a small part of London. Both have a narrative voice has some interiority, it stays on the surface of other people. This is realism flecked with modernism.

Looking back to what influenced Drabble, Lessing is the obvious proximate influence, but The Millstone holds traces of Iris Murdoch, too. Drabble has written about the way that Lessing and Angus Wilson (whose biography she wrote) are essentially realists, who use the self-consciously literary techniques of modernism. Despite this, their novels are still more interested in the world than in themselves, the basic lesson of Beautiful World.

At the end of Beautiful World, there is not just an uncomplaining acceptance of children and religion, but a joy in it, a sense that becoming a mother might be the change that makes the characters happy. This is a long way from the beliefs held at the start of the novel. Read next to The Millstone, this is a reminder of just how traditional a writer Rooney can be.

The title, by the way, comes from this passage of the Gospel of Matthew:

If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Rosamund has this same sense of uncompromising justice and motherhood makes her fierce in pursuit of it, which is why she remains so sympathetic irrespective of her other failings.