Jerusalem the Golden will surely help place Margaret Drabble among the best women novelists in England today. Written with a cool precision of diction and tone that gives pleasure on every page, it is a sophisticated version of the traditional story about a yearning provincial who comes to the big city and is corrupted. Clara Maugham's corruption, however, is a fulfillment. The world of Northam, dominated by her mother, is a kind of hell—cramped, petty, predictable, loveless, and ugly—whereas the world of the Denham family in London is a kind of heaven—open, generous, complicated, intimate, and beautiful. Revolting against a puritan background like her literary cousin, Sister Carrie (though she is more self-aware and less pitied), Clara discovers that Vanity Fair is not an obstacle to salvation but the Heavenly City itself, Jerusalem the Golden. The contrast of the two worlds is finely developed in terms of houses, mothers, names, etc. (There is much interesting play with names, with their emotional as well as symbolic meaning.) Clara's interest in her adopted family leads to an affair with the "beautiful," unhappily married Gabriel Denham, climaxed by a week in Paris during which each betrays the other. In Northam again, on a visit to her dying mother, Clara is awakened from a dream of her own dying by a telephone call from Gabriel, whereupon she "felt safe and warm once more, back at home in the realm of human treachery and love and infidelity."

This ironic pattern is crossed by another, profounder one. Endeavoring above all to become as unlike her mother as possible, Clara succeeds in entering an opposite world at the cost of becoming equally proud and unable to love. Her keen intelligence tells her that there are limits to her designs, that she is still bound to her mother by an unannihilable sense of guilt…. She perceives also, in glimpses, that her sense of special destiny is an illusion…. But Clara cannot surrender the illusion of a private exemption from the common fate of disillusionment, decay, and death.

From the opening sentence Miss Drabble maintains perfectly the delicate balance of receptive wonder and prideful self-regard that marks her heroine's character. Clara in adolescence is moved and pleased by the new sense of power she acquires with her rapidly developing mind and body…. She cultivates an "interested indifference," intending to learn the rules she must observe in order to "win." We skip then to her twenty-second year so that her character may be seen immediately in an adult world of consequences. At about this point I began to worry that Miss Drabble was too sympathetic to her heroine, but she proved to be in full control, subtly modulating to a minor key as Clara's nonresponsible passivity becomes irresponsible activity. Not that she quite withdraws her sympathy either: responsibility for Clara's inability to love is justly balanced between mother and daughter. The only fault one might find (aside from a disconcerting shift in point of view from Clara to Gabriel in a few later chapters) is that Miss Drabble, like her heroine, is too watchful, that the energies of her book are too controlled. But this seems like carping in view of the fact that she handles an interesting subject with superlative intelligence and grace. (pp. 110-12)