This novel is a stunning, astringent portrayal of a very modern heroine in a classic predicament.

Rosamund Stacey, like the "New Woman" Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir write about, is Emancipated. A clever, cool, intellectual girl just out of Cambridge University, she has a self-detachment that shields her all too well from her own emotions. Her well-to-do Socialist parents have so thoroughly instilled in her the idea of dependence as a fatal sin, that Rosamund lives in a world quite isolated from reality.

It is almost casually that she loses her virginity to George, a BBC annnouncer, but there is nothing casual about the result. When it finally occurs to Rosamund that she is indeed pregnant, a determination quite foreign to her nature and inexplicable to herself strengthens her resolve to have the child.

This is an old tale told in a new way. The experiences of an unmarried mother caught up in the assembly-line indifference of the National Health system are limned in acid, but throughout pathos and near-tragedy are balanced by superbly funny incidents and great wit.

As a cogent review in the London Times Literary Supplement succintly stated, this story is "not just a tale about unmarried pregnancy ... it is rather the story of the awakening of a person, the heightening of perceptions and the softening of attitudes."

Made into the 1969 U.K. film "Thank You All Very Much".

Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield, YorkshireShe studied English and was awarded a starred double first (a grading that indicates she attained exceptionally high scores in her university degree) in Newnham College, Cambridge.

Drabble has published seventeen novels to date. Her early novels were published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1963–87); more recently, her publishers have been Penguin and Viking. Her third novel, The Millstone (1965), brought her the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1966, and Jerusalem the Golden won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1967.

Though best known for her novels, Drabble has also written several screenplays, plays and short stories, as well as non-fiction such as A Writer's Britain: Landscape and Literature and biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. Her critical works include studies of William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy. Drabble also edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.