The Radiant Way is a 1987 novel by British novelist Margaret Drabble. The novel provides social commentary and critique of 1980s Britain, by exploring the lives of three Cambridge-educated women with careers as knowledge professionals. [1] [2]
The novel opens on New Year's Eve in 1979 as Liz Headland, a psychologist, prepares to host a party. She is married to a successful television executive and widower, Charles, and lives in a large house with her husband and nearly adult children. She has invited her two friends from her university days in Cambridge, whom she still regularly sees: Esther Breuer, a writer and lecturer on obscure historical artefacts, and Alix Bowen, who is teaching English literature to female prisoners. The novel follows these three women over the next seven years of their lives.
Though relatively uneventful, during the party Liz realises that her husband, who is about to move to the USA for a new job, has been having an affair and plans on leaving her; he confirms this at the end of the party.
A lot of the novel explores British cultural life through these three characters, while in the background a serial killer is operating in London, unnerving the three women as they transit through the city.
Alix, who was widowed at a young age with a small baby, has struggled financially and socially for years, finally marrying an English lecturer at a polytechnic. Although she enjoys her work at the prison, one of the inmates, Jilly Fox, fixates on Alix.
Esther, an academic, is content to continue her study of the obscure artefacts, living in a flat that reflects her personality and lifestyle, and is slightly perplexed by the modernising world.
Liz's mother, who still lives in the family home in the North, falls ill and is hospitalised, sparking a confrontation between Liz and her sister, Shirley. While Liz has moved up in social strata through gaining entry to Cambridge and entering a profession, Shirley has remained in her home town, married and become a housewife, and now feels abandoned, spending years caring for their cold and distant mother.
Jilly constantly tries to see and contact Alix after she is released. Despite resisting contact, Alix finally relents and sees Jilly, only for the unstable young woman to be a victim of the serial killer by the next morning.
There is the brief possibility of a romance when Liz is introduced to Stephen Cox, a novelist and journalist who is currently writing a play about Pol Pot. Although the romance is not consummated, the pair enjoy seeing each other regularly.
Charles' affair and his job in the USA run their course, and he returns to London, with there being potential for a reconciliation with Liz. Charles reflects on his early career of making documentaries with a social message; his most groundbreaking, The Radiant Way, was a documentary about education for the working class. He tries to map when he 'sold out,' after one of his former collaborators is taken hostage and executed overseas.
The trio, Liz, Alix and Esther, are having dinner at Esther's flat one evening when police appear in the street outside. The trio are telephoned and asked to stay where they are, as Esther's upstairs neighbour is arrested—he is the serial killer. Liz's mother finally dies, and she and her sister reconcile while packing up the house, where neither wants to live.
Kirkus Reviews reviews was mildly critical of the novel's tendency for exposition but writes "On the whole, however, this is one of the best of Drabble's books, immersing the reader in a credible, relevant world." [1]
Writing in The New Criterion , Donna Rifkind describes the novel as a continuation of "constraining sameness [in her other works] which keeps Drabble as a writer wandering around the same circle, treading the same ground." [3]
Dressed to Kill is a 1980 American erotic psychological thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma, and starring Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson and Nancy Allen. It depicts the events leading up to the brutal murder of a New York City housewife (Dickinson) before following a prostitute (Allen) who witnesses the crime, and her attempts to solve it with the help of the victim's son. It contains several direct references to Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho.
Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded, followed by Cecilia (1782). Most of her stage plays were not performed in her lifetime. She wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1889, forty-nine years after her death.
Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays, and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life was the first novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in 1848. The story is set in the English city of Manchester between 1839 and 1842, and deals with the difficulties faced by the Victorian working class.
Surfacing is a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Published by McClelland and Stewart in 1972, it was her second novel. Surfacing has been described by commentators as a companion novel to Atwood's collection of poems, Power Politics, which was written the previous year and deals with complementary issues.
North and South is a social novel published in 1854–55 by English author Elizabeth Gaskell. With Wives and Daughters (1865) and Cranford (1853), it is one of her best-known novels and was adapted for television three times. At first, Gaskell wanted the novel to be titled after the heroine, Margaret Hale, but Charles Dickens, the editor of Household Words, the magazine in which the novel was serialised, insisted on North and South.
The Clayhanger Family is a series of novels by Arnold Bennett, published between 1910 and 1918. Though the series is commonly referred to as a "trilogy", and the first three novels were published in a single volume, as The Clayhanger Family, in 1925, there are actually four books. All four are set in the "Five Towns", Bennett's thinly disguised version of the six towns of the Staffordshire Potteries.
Blow Your House Down is the second novel by Pat Barker. Published in 1984, the novel follows the lives of a number of prostitutes working in a northern English city at a time when a serial killer of prostitutes is haunting the area. The main focus is on two prostitute characters, Brenda and Jean, and their respective histories.
The Millstone is a novel by Margaret Drabble, first published in 1965. It is about an unmarried, young academic who becomes pregnant after a one-night stand and, against all odds, decides to give birth to her child and raise it herself.
Esther Waters is a novel by George Moore first published in 1894.
World and Town is a novel by Gish Jen that follows a Chinese American widow and her friendship with a family of Cambodian immigrants. The novel describes the difficulties encountered in the lives of characters as they embrace immigration, rationalism, and religious fundamentalism.
The Peppered Moth is a 2000 novel by English writer Margaret Drabble; it is her fourteenth published novel. The novel follows the fictional experiences of three generations of women within one family, and contains several elements that are loosely based on Drabble's own biographical experience.
Jerusalem the Golden is a novel by Margaret Drabble published in 1967, and is a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1967.
The Waterfall is a 1969 novel by British novelist Margaret Drabble. The novel is one of Drabble's more experimental narratives, starting as a third person narrative but quickly dominated by a first person protagonist Jane Gray, to guide the reader through her love affair and life.
A Natural Curiosity is a 1989 novel by Margaret Drabble. The novel is an unintended sequel to Drabble's 1987 novel The Radiant Way, follows the lives of the three protagonist women first introduced in that novel. The novel continues Drabble's interest in exploring the contemporary experience of the British middle class through the eyes of women.
The Dark Flood Rises is the 19th novel of Margaret Drabble, and was first published in 2016.
"Rest in Pieces" is the eighth episode of the ninth season of the anthology television series American Horror Story. It aired on November 6, 2019, on the cable network FX. The episode was written by Adam Penn, and directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton.
Donna R. Perry is an American serial killer. She was charged with three counts of first-degree murder in 2014 for killing three women in 1990. Perry underwent gender-affirming surgery in 2000; her gender identity formed a portion of the defense's argument.