Sarah had come home from Paris to be a bridesmaid for her sister Louise. When they were young Sarah adored her sister, but her sister never seemed to be the least bit interested in her. The novel traces a year in their lives through Sarah's eyes. It is a book about growing up, learning about different kinds of people and most of all its about the institution of marriage as viewed by Sarah through Louise's marriage.

Although this book has been around for 40 years it is still fresh and relevant today. People have always hidden who they are and what their true motives are.

I have never read a Margaret Drabble book before, but I will definitely read more in future. I love her prose and her acute observations of people. Well worth a read!

"Lady Susan" by Jane Austen is an epistolary novel comprising only letters among the characters. Lady Susan is a vile woman who is flirting her way through England after the death of her husband. She comes early in the short book to stay with her late husband's brother's family. Her sister-in-law, Catherine Vernon, shares horrified letters with her mother about Lady Susan's designs on her brother, Reginald de Courcy. She is also horrified by Lady Susan's treatment of her daughter with the late Lord Vernon, Frederica.

The novel isn't quite as rewarding as Austen's other works that I've read ("Pride and Prejudice," "Emma," "Persuasion," "Sense and Sensibility") in that the ending isn't as compelling and is a little predictable. The letter format of the book is charming, but difficult to read aloud, as we did. I found the characters more one-sided than Austen normally writes them. But I enjoyed reading it, and am looking forward to someday reading the last two, "Mansfield Park," and "Northanger Abbey."

Jane Austen loves scandal and Lady Susan is one of the best. In the first few pages we are introduced to a mother who flirts with a spoken-for man to detach him from his engagement so he'll be available to marry her daughter, all the while having her eye on a married man. Also featuring a hostile sister-in-law, a clueless brother, and an equally mischievous confidante named Alicia, the whole short novel is full of scheming, match-making, and more of Austen's usual forte, delicious gossip. 4 stars because the format of the novel, 40 letters and a conclusion, is confusing at times and makes keeping all the characters straight a challenge. Definitely rereadable, and lots of fun.

Jane Austen is known for six complete novels, each one a masterpiece. This Penguin Classics compilation features one novel unpublished in her lifetime and two unfinished fragments. This book is proof that even an incomplete Austen is better than no Austen at all.

"Lady Susan" is an epistolary novel whose eponymous anti-heroine, unlike the women featured in Austen's other works, is bad to the bone. When the book opens, Lady Susan, a stunningly beautiful widow in her upper thirties, has just been sent packing from the home of a family she had spent some months with, having been discovered carrying on a flagrant affair with the husband of the family, right under his wife's nose. She takes refuge with her kind-hearted brother and his sensible wife, who sees through Lady Susan from the day she enters the house and can't wait to see her leave. Also in the home are Lady Susan's teenage daughter, who has been expelled from boarding school after attempting to run away so that she won't be forced into marrying the rich, fatuous nobleman her mother has picked out for her; and the younger brother of Lady Susan's sister-in-law, who has heard intimations about Lady Susan's unsavory reputation; in retaliation for his initial disdain, Lady Susan sets out to captivate him and succeeds so well that she has him on the brink of proposing marriage to her, despite the fact that he is 12 years younger than she is, much to the alarm of his family. It looks as though he is about to fall into her clutches, when a chance meeting between him and the wife of Lady Susan's lover blows all Lady Susan's machinations, as well as her reputation, to smithereens. Lady Susan, to save what is left of her honor, ends up marrying the rich, fatuous nobleman she intended for her daughter; Jane Austen slyly hints that Lady Susan and her married lover will continue their affair under the noses of both their spouses. The book's ending is in a narrative style that appears simply tacked on, as if Austen got tired of both the story and the epistolary style she wrote it in; but on the whole, it's an enjoyable read, interesting mostly because it is so different in style and content from the books we're familiar with.

"The Watsons" is a delight from beginning to middle; I can't say "end" because, unfortunately, Austen never finished it. It's very much in the style of her six major works. Emma Watson is the youngest child of a large family and has been raised by her rich aunt since early childhood; she is thrown back on her impoverished family when her aunt makes an ill-advised second marriage. She is thus reintroduced at the age of 19 to her terminally ill father, two brothers and three unmarried sisters. Emma is a refreshingly original heroine very much in the style of Elizabeth Bennet; she's bright, astute, spirited, perceptive, down to earth, and unimpressed with mere good looks and money. She has no problem rejecting the town casanova who thinks he's all that and a bag of chips; nor is she especially impressed by the young lord of the manor who is infatuated with her. A footnote to the story says that Jane Austen told her sister how the book was to end; we could have guessed it even without the footnote, but it's a great story and would surely have been included in her major works if only she had lived to complete it.

"Sanditon" is probably the best known of Austen's unpublished works; it's also a fragment of a novel, very different in content from her finished works. Austen excels in writing about manners and morals; "Sanditon" is more about social commentary, and somehow, it doesn't work as well. The characters in "Sanditon" are not as interesting or compelling as the people in her other works; they are not nearly as well drawn; they're more like sketches or caricatures than three-dimensional persons. It's difficult to tell how she would have ended the book, and there's not really enough interest to the plot to make us want to know. "Sanditon" is the weakest of the three stories in this volume, but "The Watsons" and "Lady Susan" more than make up for its defects. One can see in these two works the development of a great writer.

The Peppered Moth is oddly told and while it contained enough narrative pull to keep me reading until the end, it did not contain enough to keep me compulsively reading late into the night. This may be so in part because the story of Bessie peters out after her early college days, reviving only briefly for the War and again for the few days before her death; Bessie was an unlikable character, but I would still have liked to get inside her mind as a woman sunk in disappointment, bitterness, hypochondria, and contempt as Drabble allowed us to do when Bessie was younger and still hopeful.

Fault may lie in the manner of Drabble's telling. The book bounces back and forth in time. Authorial comments abound, commenting on a character or event we've met already or that is yet to come or worse, calling attention to the narrative or its author with comments on, for example, whether a character has been described much or whether a character has been treated fairly. These asides to the reader have some appeal, but ultimately they add little to the book and can, moreover, pall a bit.

But there are good things. Drabble gives us several interesting women and wanting to know more about them, while frustrating, is not necessarily an indicator of bad writing. (If Drabble were a really bad writer, we wouldn't care enough to want to know more about her characters.) Having Bessie be a bright young thing who fails makes a change from the more common story of the bright young thing who succeeds. The industrial North of England makes a fine setting for much of the book, and it is nice to see science (genetics and evolution) used in a book, even one that is not about science per se. One occasionally sees some generational differences among grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter that suggests the social history of England over a whole century.

Best of all are the musings on Those Who Go and Those Who Stay. Why does a family stay in one spot for generation after generation, only to suddenly produce a child who must leave? Why does the same family produce one sibling who is happy to stay and one who feels he will die if he does not get away? Why do some families move about and others stay put? Why do some people feel the pull of a well-known home with all its ties and others prefer the anonymity of hotels and airports? Drabble doesn't answer any of these questions but her raising them is enough. The reader will be thinking about them for a while.

I found this book very interesting, the way Drabble uses the peppered moth to symbolise the character of Bessie, her mother who, in spite of discrimination against women in the 19th Century survives, and gets a university education but her character darkens. Likewise,the peppered moth, survives the affects of coal-mining on the environment in the north of England but evolves darker in colour, unlike the lighter colour species in other parts of England. The story is about mitochondrial DNA or matrlineal descent from the female line of four generations of women in a family.
Drabble has a tendency to comment on characters and what the reader should be getting from the story rather than letting the narrative or dialogue tell the story. She mentions in her notes that the latter part of the novel is not based on real people but is fiction. Perhaps her sharp criticism of her mother causes some guilt and she ends the story with a sympathetic portrayal of Bessie in a loving act towards her grandaughter Faro, when she hides the sixpenny bit in the Christmas pudding for the child. Dora, Bessie's spinster sister is portrayed as having no ambition and is stolidily loyal to her working-class background in Yorkshire while the ambitious Bessie cannot get far enough away from her roots. Dora is a happier character.

Although I'm not familiar with Margaret Drabble's other books and therefore can't make comparisons to her previous works, as other reviewers have done, I was riveted by this novel. It seemed to me to get off to a slow start, but by around page 75 the story, with its well-executed time shifts, its atmospheric depiction of a specific time and place, and its complicated (if gloomy) cast of characters, had me mesmerized. The writing is wonderful. Some have commented on deficiencies in the book that they attribute to Drabble's difficulty in writing about her mother with any kind of consistent tone. The author admits to those difficulties in her afterword (which I found fascinating in itself), but I think her struggle strengthens her narration. People like Bessie, particularly if they are our mothers, cause us an enormous amount of inner conflict, and this conflict is apparent in Drabble's style, which does waver a bit. This isn't a happy read, but it has its rewards, and the story is staying with me. The side-plot relating to mitochondrial DNA was interesting and provided a metaphor for the continuity of generations as well as a vehicle through which Chrissie and Faro considered their lives and their relationships.

Margaret Drabble is guilty of self-indulgent dribble. Her characters are lifeless at best and her story tiresome. The dialogue is unnatural, her descriptions needlessly wordy.

If i worked in the British Tourist Office, this book would be in the "Never Recommend this Book to a Prospective Tourist" list. The characters are despicable. The Witch, Frieda, is the most endearing character of all, and that is sad. Although she did a horrible job raising her children, she acknowledges no responsibility for how screwed up they came up to be. Ha! She plays both sides of the deck, claiming to be "green" and then profiting from industries that destroy the environment. Her son-in-law is a pretty boy politician, her favorite grandson has been brainwashed to believe he is the cat's meow, her own son is a self-important idiot who can't see beyond his own nose... Read it if you want to feel relieved at how your own family is not that bad after all.

If you read James Wood's review in the New York Times, you would get the wrong impression of this novel. The reviewer, I think, completely misunderstood it. The book is a attempt at a genre novel, notably a gothic romance where the main character hides away in an isolated mansion and behaves in a somewhat crazy fashion, at least in the view of her family. Drabble writes in the fashion of a 19th century omniscient author who intrudes and comments on the action; to return to the fashions of long ago in this case is an experimental approach to the work. What she's trying to do, I think, is jolt us into seeing contemporary England much like the 19th century writers like Dickens offered a social critique of their times. Woods calls Drabble's characters caricatures, but unlike Dickens' portrayals, these characters are not types nor are they exaggerated. They are indeed individuals, but we see them more from the outside than the inside. There are many characters in this short novel; thus they can't be as well rounded as Drabble's usual characters.

The main character, the so-called witch, is not insane as Woods says, but merely eccentric. She alone seems to escape from the strictures of modern English society and finds a meaningful kind of freedom. Her grown children do not understand her or appreciate her because they are too caught up in the necessities of contemporary life in England: the materialism, the busyness, the indulgence of children, etc. The generation in the prime of life (her grown children) has forgotten all about endeavors to reach a just society because they are too well off and are distracted. Discussions concerning a just society are just a game to these people who have every material advantage, but something very essential has been lost and only the "witch," Frieda, has any idea what that might be. The novel is a sophisticated critique of contemporary life among the upper middle classes in England. This novel deserves to be read. Mr. Wood finds cliche where there is none in this unique work.

There is nothing special about Candida, but Drabble makes her struggle to create a new life after her divorce facinating. Drabble shows that people of any age are continously searching for connection to their environments and their loved ones. The narrative change in the second half of the book does break the spell a bit, but when Candida explains what she was doing it makes sense and the ending is in keeping with the rest of narrative.

this book, out of nowhere comes the storyline change that ruined it for me. Had the story stayed on track I would have enjoyed it far more. 4 stars for the first half of the book, 2 stars for the last half. I have to wonder of Candida's friends thought the same of her as she did of Sally.

This was my first Margaret Drabble novel although I have heard of her, and had a feeling I would enjoy her work. The Seven Sisters is such clever fiction. The story is told in four parts. The first part is in the main character's words - Candida keeps a diary after her divorce and her move to a London flat. I enjoyed this part very much, and was totally surprised with one particular part to come later on in the story. The book is serious, I suppose, but there were many laugh-out-loud moments in it. I highly recommend The Seven Sisters. Her style reminds me of Carol Shields, especially her novel Larry's Party.