PREDICAMENT AND MIDLIFE CRISES OF WOMEN

Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble are two important novelists of the later part of the 20th century. Doris Lessing is the novelist of ideas and the winner of Nobel Prize for 2007. Her magnum opus, The Golden Notebook, is regarded as the Bible for feminism. Margaret Drabble, a novelist with a considerable reputation, is admired as the representative of the young women of contemporary British society. Both the writers successfully portray the problems, sufferings and experiences of women through their sensitive fiction. Tracing the genesis and development of feminism, this book focuses on predicament and midlife crises of women protagonists of these two writers and psychologically analyses in the light of feminist theory. Influenced by the ¿feminine¿ phase, these two writers exploit all the resources of the modern novel including exploded chronology, dreams, myth and stream of consciousness. The book throws light on some common themes like identity crisis, marriage, womanhood, motherhood and midlife crises and so on. It highlights how the concepts of womanhood and motherhood follow the repetitive structures and parallel patterns in many of the novels subjected to scrutiny.