Reading Order
The Millstone Reading Order
Margaret Drabble's The Millstone (1965) is a standalone novel following Rosamund Stacey, a successful young Oxford-educated academic in 1960s London who becomes pregnant after a single encounter and decides — out of stubbornness, independence, and an unwillingness to ask for help from anyone — to keep the child and manage alone. One of the defining novels of postwar British women's fiction and a sharp portrait of a certain kind of English intellectual woman.
Where to start
The Millstone
Complete The Millstone Book List
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The Millstone
Margaret Drabble·1965·The complete novel. Entirely standalone. - Buy
The Waterfall
OptionalMargaret Drabble·1969·Jane Gray, a poet, and her love affair with her cousin's husband — Drabble's fourth novel; shares The Millstone's portrait of a particular kind of intelligent English woman in conflict with the social expectations of her time, and its preoccupation with the experience of motherhood and sexuality from a woman's perspective. - Buy
The Needle's Eye
OptionalMargaret Drabble·1972·Rose Vasiliou, a wealthy woman who has deliberately given up her fortune, and her friendship with a lawyer — Drabble's most ambitious novel; shows her development from the intimate, first-person domestic drama of The Millstone to a more panoramic social canvas. - Buy
The Middle Ground
OptionalMargaret Drabble·1980·Kate Armstrong, a journalist in middle age, taking stock of her life — Drabble's later novel returns to the questions The Millstone raises about women's choices, but with the retrospective perspective of a character who has already lived through the consequences.
The Millstone — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Millstone a feminist novel?
The Millstone is feminist in effect if not in explicit program — it was published in 1965, before second-wave feminism had fully articulated the political framework that would later be used to describe it. Rosamund's determination to have and raise her child alone, without the involvement of the father or the assistance of family, is an assertion of female autonomy at a moment when the assumption was that an unmarried pregnant woman must either marry quickly, have an abortion (illegal in Britain until 1967), or give the child up for adoption. Her refusal of all three conventional options — made not out of political conviction but out of a characteristic combination of pride, stubbornness, and an inability to ask for help — is the novel's central feminist gesture. The novel is also honest about the costs: the loneliness, the financial difficulty, the way that having a child alone forces Rosamund into a relationship with the NHS and with working-class London that her Oxford education had previously insulated her from.
Who is Rosamund Stacey, and why is she such an unusual literary heroine?
Rosamund Stacey is unusual among literary heroines of the 1960s in being genuinely, unironically intelligent — academically accomplished, professionally successful, financially self-sufficient — and in being the novel's narrator with a voice of considerable self-awareness and dry comedy. She is also unusual in being a character whose primary relationship is with her child rather than with any man: the father of her baby is barely present after the single encounter from which Rosamund becomes pregnant, and the romance plot that dominates most fiction about young women is almost entirely absent. What replaces it is Rosamund's evolving relationship with her daughter Octavia — a relationship that Drabble renders with great honesty about both the love and the terror of parenting, and about the way that having a child changes a person in ways they could not have anticipated.
What is the significance of The Millstone's title?
The title comes from the New Testament: 'Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.' Drabble uses the phrase ironically: the 'millstone' around Rosamund's neck is her daughter Octavia, but the relationship between the image and the novel's emotional reality reverses the conventional assumption. Octavia, whom Rosamund did not plan for and initially regards with anxiety, becomes the organizing center of her life and the source of the most intense love she has ever felt. The millstone is a burden, yes — but it is also the thing that gives Rosamund's life weight and meaning, that anchors her to the world and to other people in a way her previous self-sufficient isolation had prevented. The title's irony is gentle: Drabble is not mocking the biblical phrase but showing how a burden can be a gift.
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