Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone: A Love Story

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones who believe in me, it were better that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea

(Matthew 18:6)

The Millstone, a novel which was published by British author Margaret Drabble in 1965, tells the story of a young female academic who becomes pregnant and decides to keep the child and raiser her on her own. The plot is set at the very beginning of the sexual revolution: society has become progressive enough for her to contemplate becoming a single mother, but not yet so accepting that she can do so without facing significant judgment from those around her. The story feels rather commonplace for a contemporary audience: although there are certainly material difficulties for a woman who wishes to raise a child on her own, the idea itself does not strike us as outrageous or morally doubtful. Yet at the time the story was judged as sufficiently novel and worthy of interest to justify it being adapted to the screen, with the 1969 film A Touch of Love (the trailer announces the story of a young woman who “does it her way… or not at all”). Drabble’s novel is rarely mentioned among the canon of narratives that depict the issue of motherhood and its impact on women’s creativity; one, I would suggest, because it predates by several decades the “boom of motherhood memoirs” which took place in the early 2000s, and two, because it offers a very original take on the matter.

The Millstone is best studied within the context of a subcategory of novels which depict the struggles of a female artist or academic to carry on with her intellectual pursuits while taking care of a small child – one may only think of Sarah Moss’s 2011 novel Night Waking (which I have mentioned here), Rachel Cusk’s 2009 The Bradshaw Variations or Rachel Yoder’s much-hyped Nightbitch (2021). What these novels have in common is their characters’ realisation that most of their difficulties find their roots in gender inequality, in that the children’s fathers are never expected to give up nearly as much as the mothers. Drabble’s novel stands out nevertheless, because although it does feature a young female academic, it pictures her as welcoming the baby outside of the framework of traditional heterosexual romance. From that point of view, there is far less resentment being expressed at the imbalance between her and a possible husband or partner; because she decides to “go it alone”, she is also ready to face the consequences. And, as we will see, the arrival of the baby in her life is a far less disruptive event than it is in the novels I have mentioned before.

A second context in which Drabble’s novels may be studied is the broader question of the impact of a baby on her mother’s creativity, which is one that runs through most of the texts (be they fiction or nonfiction) I have been studying, dividing them into roughly two categories. The first category of texts represent motherhood as an impediment to a woman’s creativity: whether she is a writer or an academic, the woman who will welcome her baby will find herself immediately short of time and mental space to carry on with her creation the way she used to before she gave birth. Usually, the disruption is temporary, and the women learn to work around their duties as mothers. There is, nevertheless, a second category of texts which purport to show that motherhood need not be an impediment to a woman’s career, and may even empower her creativity, with the notable examples of Alice Walker, and her 1976 essay “A Writer Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children” or Alicia Ostriker’s 1980 “Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas”. As I will be showing, the conclusion to Drabble’s novel clearly places it in that second category.

The title of the novel itself is ambiguous: a “millstone”, per its dictionary definition, is a burden, a heavy responsibility one has to bear often against one’s will. The reader is tempted to enter this novel about motherhood thinking that the baby to come will be the millstone itself, that proverbial albatross the main character will be doomed to carry around all her life because of one bad decision. Yet I believe the author is playing with our expectations here, as the baby turns out to be much more of a blessing than a curse in her mother’s life. On further inquiry, we discover that this novel is part of a series of other novels by Drabble which borrow their titles from biblical texts. The millstone being referred to here is the threat of punishment issued by Christ against those who would harm “the little ones” among his followers. From that point of view, the image of the millstone is not made to refer to the heavy price the baby’s mother will be made to pay, but rather to her wish to protect her from whatever harm may befall her.

Rosamund Stacey, the main character, is a young academic who, unlike her friends, has no interest for the sexual revolution which is taking hold of the London society around her. The daughter of absent parents with a very strong left-wing ethic, she is happy to watch the sexual lives of her group of her friends from a distance, and remain immersed in her work on Elizabethan poetry. She suspects that the doctoral thesis she is working might be an unnecessary indulgence, but plows through nevertheless, while her closest friends are busy writing exciting contemporary novels. She conducts her first sexual encounters very much like a social experiment and keeps a similar level of intellectual detachment through her pregnancy. She does not expect that the child will in any way disrupt her plans even as she plans to raise her on her own. In most similar narratives – I’m thinking her of Jane Lazarre’s The Mother Knot as the most notable example – this would signal that the main character is setting herself up for the most cruel disillusionment. Many creative mothers comment, with hindsight, on how naïve they had been to think that they would even be able to carry out any intellectual pursuit with a baby in tow. Yet once again, Drabble’s novel defies our expectations.

Also, although I am diffident about the particulars of my qualifications, I suppose I must have a rock-like confidence in my own talent, for I simply did not believe that the handicap of one small illegitimate baby would make a scrap of difference to my career: I was in such a strong position by nature that were a situation to arise in which there were any choice to make between me and another, I would win, through the evident superiority of my mind.

Margaret Drabble, The Millstone, 1965

While she is pregnant, Rosamund is concerned that the baby will indeed become a cross to bear: the mothers she runs into at the clinic or in the streets all appear to be heavy, encumbered, their freedom hindered by the responsibility for the children. Yet the birth of the child is represented as a happy and charming event, and the mother is shocked at how easy it is to love and be loved in return. Indeed, the arrival of the baby in Rosamund’s life does not create a massive disruption: armed with her confidence, Rosamund takes the baby in her stride, and finishes her doctoral thesis without so much as a hesitation. From a material point of view, her decision to eschew the comfort of marriage is a successful one: she gets help from her best friend as well as a babysitter, who take care of the baby far better than any man would have within the confines of a heterosexual relationship. The matter of organising the care of the baby does not appear to be a cause for concern and is even a source of connection with the people around her.

The real crisis in the novel happens when Rosamund fears that she may lose her child to a life-threatening disease. The baby, Octavia, is saved, but will remain fragile her whole life. So is the love she will bear her mother: Rosamund is perfectly aware that the destiny of a child is to separate from her mother, but is ready to take the plunge into a relationship which will eventually become one-sided. Faced with the possibility of rekindling the feelings she briefly exchanged with the baby’s father, Rosamund makes the conscious choice of remaining outside the traditional framework of domesticity and romance, regardless of the symbolic price to pay.

A bad investment, I knew, this affection, and one that would leave me in the dark the cold in years to come, but then what warmer passion ever lasted longer than six months?

Margaret Drabble, The Millstone, 1965

The Millstone is a deeply moving novel, because it tells the story of one woman who falls in love – not with a man, as the heterosexual romantic plot would have it – but with her baby. This love, she knows, will eventually grow distant as most mothers know and fear, yet all things considered, she is happy to renounce the possibility of marriage. One of the first academic papers dedicated to the novel, written in 1978 by Susan Spitzer¹, sees the character’s choice as a sign of her immaturity and insufficient separation from her own mother. I choose to see this novel as a fulfilment of the wish of so many mother writers’ (Alicia Ostriker, Eavan Boland, to name but a few): that one day, the love a mother has for her child would be deemed worthy of literary representation just as much as romantic love. This novel also sheds a fresh light on the issue of creativity and motherhood because it does not see the relationship between those two terms as problematic in any way – quite the opposite. A baby, Drabble suggests, need not be a millstone hanging from her mother’s neck, and bearing down on her, it can also open up whole new ways of being in the world.

1. Spitzer, Susan. « Fantasy and Femaleness in Margaret Drabble’s “The Millstone” ». NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 11, n^o 3 (1978): 227‑45. https://doi.org/10.2307/1344962. ↩︎

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