Books: Sisters and Strangers

THE MIDDLE GROUND by Margaret Drabble; Knopf; 277pages; $10.95

Author Margaret Drabble, age 41, has already displayed one of the most interesting galleries of heroines in contemporary letters. Over the course of 17 years and eight novels, the Drabble woman has moved from the consuming intensities of young marriage and small children toward the objective uncertainties of middle age. She has taken jobs and established careers; an early feminist, she has been buoyed by the support of her sisters and occasionally troubled by their anger and bitterness. She would still like to live with a man, although divorce and failed affairs have left her wondering why.

Drabble the writer has changed over the years as well. The sensitive, intelligent young novelist has steadily moved beyond the shell of her characters' egos toward the world of public issues and crises. An admirer of Arnold Bennett, she now writes like an Edwardian who has tasted the apple of modernism.

This combination works splendidly in The Middle Ground. Kate Armstrong, the novel's heroine, is both the logical culmination of Drabble's female characters and good fun to be around on her own. In her early 40s, Kate has acquired three teen-age children, an ex-husband, an ex-lover, and a thriving career writing about women's issues for London newspapers and glossy magazines. She has also undergone a necessary but heartbreaking abortion. The realization of how much she wanted another child, even if seriously crippled, has badly shaken both her and many of her opinions. "Freedom is very bad for people," she tells Hugo, a platonic male friend, and adds: "I must have been mad to try to pretend that the sexes were much the same." Kate begins to subject her life and career to severe scrutiny, with downbeat results: "She found herself trapped in stale repetition, and depressed by the fact that as everyone else got more interested in Women she became less and less so. The feeling of deep boredom which overcame her when she opened a woman's novel frightened her."

It takes real courage for anyone, even a character in a book, to say such things these days: what Kate calls "the cries of hate from the sexual battleground" still ring out from both sides of the front. But Drabble has not gone over to the enemy.

Kate's story is hardly one of sexual recidivism; she remains admirably independent throughout her crisis. Near the end, she concludes: "Men and women can nev er be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace." Kate's problem transcends sex: "What on earth should one do next?" To her credit, Kate finds no single slogan or ideology a sufficient guide through that complex maze.

Her search for some answer takes her back to the scrubby suburb of her childhood and to the girls' school that expected so little of her and her classmates.

Preparing a TV documentary on new opportunities for women, Kate ponders both the stunted lives of the old girlfriends who stayed behind and the possibility that the freedom from early pressure made her own success easier for her. As this mud dle deepens, Drabble's vision expands to include a London equally confused. Eng land is a tight little island no longer.