Drabble

I am looking at a photo of Margaret Drabble in this week's Spectator. It was taken some time ago because she looks quite young. She is sitting very upright on a chair, fingers of her right hand in the air poised above a typewriter, left hand resting on the side of the typewriter. She seems about ready to type but she is thoughtful; her face is young but already has a look of womanhood about it; there's a bandana round her head and her hair, what little can be seen of it, is centre-parted like a headmistress's. She does have that headmistressy look about her. Perhaps that's the reason I have taken a disliking to her. Not just now but for years. Why?
Francis King reviews her new book of short stories (old stories, new collection) on the page opposite her photo. He met her when she was about to be published. They had lunch with his publisher at Wiedenfield and Nicolson. "I found myself facing," he writes, "a woman, attractive but not beautiful." Later the woman publisher says to King: "There's someone who already knows what she's going to do - and, by golly, she'll do it."
Which, of course, she did. Novels, essays, editing the Oxford companion to English Literature.... and so on.
I think I must be jealous of her success. Yet she doesn't carry her success too well. I feel she is proud of her achievements to such a degree that she seems superior. And not in a nice way. In an "Oxford way". Because she is "so Oxford", isn't she? She has that air of superiority that a good many Oxford students have. I don't suppose they know they are developing it while students but something happens to them and they come away with a chip on their shoulders.
I looked for a poem by D.H.Lawrence about Oxford and superiority but all I could find was this:
"How nice it is to be superior!
Because really, it's no use pretending, one is superior, isn't one?
I mean people like you and me -

Quite! I quite agree.
The trouble is, everybody thinks they're just as superior
As we are, just as superior -"

Etc.
There's a smugness about her I feel, an intellectual smugness. She is "so Oxfordly" smug.
Can't say I like her sister much either. I've heard they hate each other which goes some way to making me feel better about the rather nasty way I feel about her.