The Waterfall is "the most female of all [Drabble's] books" not because, as she suggests, it begins with childbirth and ends with a thrombic-clot induced by contraceptive pill-taking, but because it considers the situation of a woman who does not deny her generic femininity, whose first words in the novel, far from asserting her will, announce her essential passivity: "If I were drowning I couldn't reach out a hand to save myself, so unwilling am I to set myself up against my fate."

Fate is a word and a concept which pervades Margaret Drabble's fiction…. The "fate" that Jane acknowledges has something to do with her "nature," and she claims to be powerless to resist it…. Jane is governed by her female sexuality. (pp. 83-4)

Perhaps the most obvious formal feature of The Waterfall is the split in its narrative structure…. The Waterfall alternates between sections of first- and third-person narration, some of them long enough to beguile the reader into believing she or he is reading a conventional, straightforward novel in either the first- or third-person narrational mode. Then, when the reader's guard is lowered, the narrative mode shifts. The effect continues to be startling. (p. 87)

That is because the whole story of The Waterfall is not simply what it means to be female. What it is is suggested by … [Drabble when she says]: "My favorite experimental novelist is Doris Lessing—The Golden Notebook, actually." The Golden Notebook is about a protagonist who is a woman and a novelist. As a woman she feels, like Jane Gray, divided—her word is "fragmented." This sense of inner division affects her ability to write; she fragments her experience into various notebooks and projects aspects of herself and her experience onto several fictional alter egos in the novels she is attempting to write. The Golden Notebook is a great novel, comprehending much more than the experience of being a woman. (p. 88)

[The] whole story of The Waterfall is the same as one of the stories The Golden Notebook tells, what it means not only to be a woman but to be a writer. Like The Golden Notebook, The Waterfall is a metafiction, a novel about writing novels. But while there are uncanny similarities between the two novels, there is one crucial difference. Lessing's metafictional speculations are not gender-specific; Drabble's are.

Lessing's Anna Wulf is a novelist, quite possibly a surrogate for the novelist Doris Lessing….

Drabble's Jane Gray is a poet. She is also, by virtue of the "experimental" form of The Waterfall, a novelist, quite possibly a surrogate for the novelist Margaret Drabble. As the first-person sections of the novel reveal, Jane is writing about her experience with James and writing as a novelist…. (p. 89)

But although many of Jane's meditations and reservations about art and the fictional process echo Anna Wulf's, The Waterfall is not another Golden Notebook. Anna Wulf mistrusts art because its inherent order is false to reality as she perceives it in her experience. Jane Gray mistrusts art because the only art she knows is masculine, and it is false to her female experience. The Golden Notebook calls for a new kind of mimesis; The Waterfall for a feminine aesthetic.

The odd, if not exactly experimental, form of The Waterfall helps Margaret Drabble to tell "the whole story," the story first—as I have indicated—of what it means to be a woman, and second of what it means to be a woman novelist. What Drabble has done, intuitively it seems, is to find a form that expresses the divisions not only within the woman but within the artist who is also a woman. (pp. 89-90)

Jane's task as woman and as artist is the same: to acknowledge the existence within her of the Other, and not simply to reconcile but to encompass that division. As a woman, she does this by discovering, with James, her essentially passive sexuality and then refusing to be defined solely in terms of it. For it is important to see that Jane does not remain in sexual bondage to James, that by the end of the novel she has reasserted her rational, productive, "masculine" aspect (she cleans up her house, hires an au pair girl, writes and has published "a very good sequence of poems,") … while at the same time keeping in touch with the passive, sexual, "feminine" self that James has aroused. As an artist, Jane Gray must find a way of incorporating into her shapely, Apollonian, "male" fiction some of the inchoate, liquid "femininity" of her experience. The form of Drabble's fiction, with its alternation of first- and third-person sections, enables her to show the merger of these two aspects of Jane Gray. (p. 92)

In The Waterfall, Margaret Drabble examines female nature and discovers it to be divided between rational and animal, personal and impersonal, mind and body, "male" and "female." In order to be whole (and wholly a woman), Drabble suggests, a woman must reconcile these divisions. And if a woman writer is to articulate this experience of what it is to be a woman, she must devise a form, as Drabble has done in The Waterfall, which amalgamates feminine fluidity and masculine shapeliness. The Waterfall is "the most female" of Drabble's books because, paradoxically, it is the most nearly androgynous. (p. 99)