English writer of novels that are skillfully modulated variations on the theme of a girl's development toward maturity through her experiences of love, marriage, and motherhood.

Drabble began writing after leaving Cambridge University. The central characters of her novels, although widely different in character and circumstance, are shown in situations of tension and stress that are the necessary conditions for their moral growth. Drabble is concerned with the individual's attempt to define the self, but she is also interested in social change. She writes in the tradition of such authors as George Eliot, Henry James, and Arnold Bennett.

Drabble's early novels include A Summer Bird-Cage (1962), about a woman unsure of her life's direction after dropping out of graduate school, and The Millstone (1965), the story of a woman who eventually sees her illegitimate child as both a burden and a blessing. Drabble won the E.M. Forster Award for The Needle's Eye (1972), which explores questions of religion and morality. Her trilogy comprising The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989), and The Gates of Ivory (1991) follows the lives of three women who met at Cambridge during the 1950s. In The Peppered Moth (2000) Drabble detailed four generations of mothers and daughters in a Yorkshire family. The Sea Lady (2007) traces the relationship of a man and woman who met as children before either became famous—he as a marine biologist and she as a feminist—and ends with their reunion. In addition to her novels, Drabble wrote several books on the general subject of literature, as well as journal articles and screenplays. She also edited the Oxford Companion to English Literature.