Sarah had come home from Paris to be a bridesmaid for her sister Louise. When a child,
Sarah had adored her elder sister, but Louise had grown up to be an arrogant, selfish, cold
and extravagant woman. She was also breath-takingly beautiful. The man she was to marry,
Stephen Halifax, was a successful novelist, very rich and snobbishly unpleasant. From
Sarah's first night at home she began to question Louise's motives in this loveless match.
A Summer Bird-Cage is the story of Louise's marriage as seen through Sarah's eyes.
It is also the story of a year in Sarah's own life. She is a young woman, intelligent
and attractive, just down from Oxford, but completly at loose ends without close friends
or a lover. What she discovers about herself is as fascinating as what she discovers
about love, infidelity and her sister Louise.
Literary critic Watler Allen, writing in The New York Times, said, "This novel
seems to me extremely close to the grain of English life at the present moment. We
shall do well if we get another first novel as good this year."
Margaret Drabble is a twenty-five-year-old actress who has performed with the Royal
Shakespear Company at Stratford. She is married to an actor, lives in London and
is the mother of two children. She read English at Cambridge, where she gained
First Class Honours.
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