The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble

Reading Group Discussion ideas

‘What she felt for those children, as she was to realise some years later, was a proleptic tenderness’

This is the opening sentence of The Pure Gold Baby. ‘Prolepsis’ is not a commonly used word, with a very specific meaning:

• A narrative device in which an event is prefigured by a feeling, action or description • Where an event or situation is responded to prior to its occurrence

To what extent does the novel play with this idea of something that is both in the future and in the past?

Is the idea of anticipating things that are not there a particularly maternal concern?

Anna – the pure gold baby – has a very special relationship to the concept of time. Is this something the novel regards as a blessing or a curse for Anna herself and for those that care for her?

Does prolepsis describe something we have all experienced at some point in our lives?

As a technical device is it something you have noticed other writers use to foreshadow events in other novels, and can you think of specific examples you might like to discuss?

‘We lived in an innocent world. What did we mean by “innocence”, you may ask?’

The idea of innocence and purity is a major concern of the novel. Which characters do you regard as being ‘innocent’ and does this change as the novel develops?

Equally, do you think the idea of innocence is also being discussed in relation to society as a whole at the time in which the novel is set? Has the world become less innocent since this novel’s setting? Does The Pure Gold Baby raise questions about individuals – or society as a whole – having lost their innocence? The idea of childhood and innocence is a central thematic concern of literature. To what extent do you think the loss of innocence – or its preservation – in childhood is a major concern of the novel? Do you think childhood innocence is eroded at a younger age in children now?

‘I mourn those days when the children were young. I miss them. Sometimes I look at the little drawer in my desk where I used to keep the family allowance book and my eyes fill with tears.’

The novel is something of a meditation on the nature of maternal love. Are some naturally more maternal than others? How has society’s perception of the parent-child relationship shifted since the 1960s? ‘So that is Jess’s story, and the story of Anna. I will leave them in mid-air, but you will know that they landed safely, or I wouldn’t have been able to tell their story so far.’ Jess and Anna’s story is refracted through the lens of the book’s narrator. How does this affect our reading of the novel? To what degree would you describe the narrator as ‘unreliable’? How does the fact that the story is being told through a third person create a sense of distance from Jess and Anna? How is your reading affected by being directly addressed by the narrator?

Additional Questions: The Pure Gold Baby and The Millstone ‘At the story’s centre stands a mother-child diptych, a secular pietà, reprising but reconfiguring familiar motifs. Like Rosamund in The Millstone (1965), a young professional woman – in this case an anthropologist, Jess – becomes pregnant, struggling with the demands of single motherhood’ Independent

‘Jess’s situation has similarities to that of Rosamund Stacey, the protagonist of Drabble's celebrated 1965 novel, The Millstone; they are both studious, seriously scholarly types who find themselves briefly enthralled by a man and then left holding the baby. In spite of the threat to their academic lives, neither minds; both are also fiercely committed to their daughters. But where Rosamund's Octavia in The Millstone had a congenital heart defect that was addressed by surgery, Anna's condition has far more wide-ranging and long-lasting implications’ Alex Clark, Guardian

A number of reviews of The Pure Gold Baby have linked the novel to Margaret Drabble’s first novel The Millstone.

Do you see a link between the two novels?

How do the novels diverge in their discussion of motherhood?

To what extent do you think the difference in perspective is the product of the age at which Margaret Drabble wrote the two novels, or do you think that the times in which she was writing are a more significant factor?

What differences in Margaret Drabble’s style of writing do you particularly notice between the two novels?

About the Author

Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen highly acclaimed novels including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize-winning The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, the trilogy comprising The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity and The Gates of Ivory and most recently The Pure Gold Baby. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.