Margaret Drabble’s writing emerged from the turbulences of the second wave feminist movement and the radical demands and changes it brought to contemporary fiction. She married young, had children, and started work on what would become her first published novel at the age of twenty-one, soon after graduating from the University of Cambridge, in 1960. In a BBC documentary about the young Drabble, recorded around the time of her first literary successes—mid-to-late sixties, the time of her award-winning novels The Millstone and Jerusalem the Golden—she appears the embodiment of cool: the young Glenda Jackson style, the mini-skirt, the knee-high boots, the effortless, understated 1960s glamour.

Her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, is a joyful bundle of contradictions, in which the chatty musings about clothes, popularity, and men do not distract from the historical question at hand: what can a young woman do with her life in the latter half of the twentieth century? All her young novels have in common this urge to crack open, even if just a little, the windows to personal freedom: what if, terrifyingly, we women are freer than we thought? The seventies novels, like The Needle’s Eye (1972) and The Ice Age (1977), grow in sociological and political density and display an acute sense for limitations put on humans—not only gender but also class, ethnicity, family structure, the complex web of relations into which we are born. Some of her later novels explicitly strike up a conversation with history and mythology: The Seven Sisters (2002), while describing how a group of older women overcame their differences and mutual mistrust and found a common mission, is also retelling of the Aeneid. The Radiant Way (1987) is a wide-ranging exploration of culture and arts through the lives and minds of its three protagonists, while The Peppered Moth (2001) brings into close relationship the biological history of the human species and the personal life choices of its central characters.

Drabble’s range in nonfiction is equally formidable: books on Thomas Hardy,Wordsworth, Angus Wilson, Arnold Bennett, and the editorship of the 5th and 6th editions of the venerable reference book The Oxford Companion to English Literature, are just some of the publications. There is also journalism, if all too infrequently—a handful of essays and reviews may appear every year in the British broadsheets. Her personal in memoriam to Doris Lessing that The Guardian published right after the Nobel Winner’s death, in 2013, is of extraordinary emotional power and political wisdom while seeming a simple recollection of Lessing as a visitor and as a host.

I spoke with Margaret Drabble in Toronto, during her brief stay at a writers’ festival, where she came to talk about her most...