Date/Time: 6th October 2009, 17:30

Venue: Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building (opposite Haymarket Metro)

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Margaret Drabble will talk about her new book, The Pattern in the Carpet, which is in part a memoir, in part a history of the jigsaw puzzle and of children's play. She will describe how the book began in the British Library with her research into the earliest educational puzzles, created in the eighteenth century, which were known as dissected maps and were mentioned by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park. It evolved into a personal exploration of the patterns of memory, and a celebration of the life of her aunt, with whom she did many jigsaws both in childhood and old age. The subject branches into the history of board games, the Enlightenment concept of childhood, the Italian travels of Goethe, and the manufacture of mosaics- a pattern of interlocking pieces, with the jigsaw puzzle itself as a connecting motif, as well as an enduring pleasure.

 

Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and educated in York and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied English Literature. Her father, John Drabble, was County Court Judge of Northumberland in the 1950s and early 60s, when the family lived in Wylam-on-Tyne. Margaret Drabble was, briefly, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, where she began to write fiction: her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, was published in 1963. She is the author of seventeen novels, most recently The Sea Lady, and has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson.  She edited the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985, 2000.) She is married to the biographer, Michael Holroyd, and has three children from her first marriage to the actor Clive Swift. She was awarded the DBE in 2008.

 

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