Penguin ‘want to dumb me down’ says Drabble

Novelist Margaret Drabble has accused her publishers, Penguin, of trying to get her to "dumb down" her writing to appeal to a larger readership. Drabble, who is shortly to take over the chairmanship of the Society of Authors, made her remarks at a meeting of alumni at her old Cambridge University college, Newnham, where she had gone to discuss the state of literary culture in Britain. She said: "I have had a weird feeling that I'm being dumbed down by my publishers."

According to the Independent, a source close to Drabble, who was made a Dame in 1980 for her services to literature, said that the 69-year old author felt pressure from Penguin to "rebrand" her fiction. Fellow writer Sarah Dunant, who also took part in the debate, confirmed her belief. "She [Dame Margaret] expressed the view that her publishers wanted to remarket her in some way, that there was some need not to let the work just stand on its own.

"My impression... was that there was a certain amount of trepidation in putting this to her (from her publishers). She had given them short shrift. She felt that at this moment in [one's] career, who could need to be remarketed or repackaged?" Dunant also said Drabble was annoyed that publishing houses tend to market authors as "semi-celebrities".

Publishing, said Dunant, had been “saturated with the notion of the creation of celebrity as a marketing opportunity... There has to be a box, a place they can put you. I just find it annoying but it doesn't stop me from writing exactly what I wish to write. This conversation between Margaret Drabble and myself was part of the larger observation that everything needs to be packaged, that writers cannot be who they are."

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Drabble has written 17 novels and seven works of non-fiction as well as earning a CBE. “I can sense my publishers have difficulty in selling me as a genre,” she told the Independent, “whether in literary fiction, or women's fiction or shopping fiction. They don't quite know whether I'm highbrow or literary."  Thus far, Penguin have not commented on her remarks. ·