Wolves in Wolf Hall: An Intersectional Study of Wolves and Humans in Wolf Hall Triptych

This article examines novels by two postwar British women writers, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall, within the context of twentieth-century feminism and its experiments with a postmodernist form of writing. The article examines how these two novels, in different ways, use strategies derived from both realist and postmodernist forms to achieve two ends: first, to reach out to a popular female readership by depicting the everyday challenges faced by women both inside the home and outside the household, and second, to subvert patriarchal ideas with innovative uses of a self-reflexive narrative form. I demonstrate that there are diverse and rich possibilities in these mid-twentieth-century narratives that freely avail of several realist and postmodernist strategies to raise feminist questions and offer answers.