Contemporary British novelist Margaret Drabble has enjoyed popularity and critical acclaim for more than thirty years. While the author's fatalistic vision has been formerly analyzed by critics of her work, what has not been assessed in previous texts is the way in which her theories of psychological determinism affect her heroines' lives and, in many cases, are compatible with much of Freud and his successors' psychoanalytic thinking.

The purpose of The Novels of Margaret Drabble: "this Freudian family nexus," then, is to examine the writer's fatalism by investigating the ways in which her vision resembles the psychoanalytic tradition. Dr. Nicole Bokat's psychobiography focuses on Drabble's fascination with troubling familial relationships. It explores the connections between personal history - including the relevant fact that her older sister is the renowned novelist A. S. Byatt - and literary representation.