MARGARET DRABBLE:FEMINIST NOVELIST? If,as Margaret Drabble has said novelists are "inspired gossips"(MS 32),then Drabble is one of the more inspired of those writers who makes us feel as if we are listening to ordinary people tell stories about one another to one another.This particular story-telling technique is a characteristic which has made her popular with the general reader,an audience she continues to attract although her work since THE NEEDLE'S EYE in 1972 has occasioned considerable attention from literary cri- tics.In fact,when friends,who are not necessarily interested in reading a "literary"writer,ask me to recommend a modern writer,without hesitation,I say, "Margaret Drabble,because most readers find her novels are,at the very least,entertaining.1 Why Read Margaret Drabble? The first five novels,through THE WATERFALL,are probably most entertaining to women because these novels very accurately and sympathetically portray the process of young women coming to adulthood in the late fifties and early sixties.As realistic accounts of women's lives in that period,her novels could serve as social histories, 1