From a tender age, Clara Maugham had loved the old hymn which began:
Jerusalem the Golden
With milk and honey blest...
although what she pictured was not the pearly gates of some heavenly city, but a terrestrial
paradise where beautiful people lived in beautiful houses and spoke of beautiful things.
It was the winning of a state scholarship that transported her, incredibly, mercifully, from
a drab, restrictive life in the north of England and a mother who seemed the epitome of crushed
hopes and limited horizons, to London - Clara's golden Jerusalem.
From her vantage point of age twenty-two, it seemed fortunate to Clara that she did not meet
the Denhams until her third year at the University. At first, all people not from home
seemed equally brilliant and charming, and although the Denhams had more than their share
of both brilliance and charm, they had also a very special faculty for enjoying life.
Under their auspices, Clara discovers that there is indeed a colorful and heterogeneous world
available for the asking, and she enters it with single-minded purpose, heedless of the
chaos she creates around her...
Margaret Drabble's three preceding novels, The Summer Bird-Cage, The Garrick Year and
The Millstone have established her in the front rank of young English novelists.
The Millstone won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. Miss Drabble has recently been
recipient of a Society of Author's Travelling Fellowship. She is married to Clive
Swift, the actor, and has three small children.
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