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Drabble's work:
Jerusalem the Golden
In
Jerusalem the Golden, written in 1967, the heroine, Clara,
has not had a happy childhood: Her mother was very cold and
distant. As a girl Clara was "repressed" - she wasn't encouraged
to have natural feelings or to communicate very much. At the
age of 18, Clara travels from her home in the North of England
to study at University in London. There she meets Clelia Denham
who becomes her best friend, someone she admires greatly. Clelia
comes from a very Bohemian, very artistic and wealthy family
and Clara is particularly drawn to her mother, Mrs Denham, who
is a writer and not at all like her own mother...
 Mrs Denham
Clara loves the Denham family and everything they represent. Her own family rarely communicate and Clara's relations with her mother are very strained. Clara is increasingly drawn in to the Denham family, and has an affair with Clelia's brother, Gabriel, who is unhappily married. For Drabble, there is an ambiguity about Clara's relationship with the Denhams and her admiration of Mrs Denham.
| "There's a sort of common sense versus the bohemian romantic, which again is a struggle I've always been dealing with, because of the Northern Yorkshire common sense with which I was brought up. I've always had a yearning to the exotic and romantic, but if you are brought up in that kind of repressed background, you do keep going back to your roots which is what Clara fears she may do.
To Clara, who's a girl from the North, from a rather boring home, she sees London as Jerusalem the Golden, she sees the streets of London as paved with gold, like Dick Whittington in the fairy story. For her it was not money but glamour and the excitement of getting out of her miserable background and coming to this wonderful golden, social place. The title is an ironic comment that her vision was very worldly, it was not a very spiritual vision"
Margaret Drabble |
At the end of the novel Clara believes that she has escaped from her Northern background and that she has found freedom. For Drabble, Clara's idea of freedom is a selfish one, one in which individuals pursue their own needs at the expense of the community and cut themselves off from their roots.
Breaking away
At
the end of the novel Jerusalem the Golden, Clara discovers
that her mother had been very different before her marriage.
She returns home when her mother is in hospital and discovers
photographs of her as a young woman 'smiling bravely, gaily,
a smile radiant with hope and intimacy'. Clara finds exercise
books full of poetry written by her mother and realises that
she has never really known her鈥�
Clara reads her mothers life.
publication details
A Summer Birdcage (1964), Weidenfield & Nicholson
Ltd
Jerusalem the Golden (1967), Weidenfield & Nicholson
Ltd
The Radiant Way (1987), Weidenfield & Nicholson
Ltd
The Peppered Moth (2001), Weidenfield & Nicholson
Ltd
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