Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Frances Wingate is a woman much given to living in the past. As an eminent archaeologist she travels widely giving lectures on ancient history. As a woman she is eaten away with regrets that she ended her relationship with Karel - for reasons that no longer seem valid.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Archaeologist Frances Wingate, traveling through goodly states and kingdoms, having long since divorced her husband and managed to bring up four children while leaving them at will, seems to be the first Margaret Drabble heroine who is representative of her times while not a casualty of them. But then by nature, Frances is careless, confident, self-sufficient and reasonably sure that a woman can't handle both a man and children, even if this seems markedly at odds with ""nature and society."" All around her are such dreadful human remains--her well-preserved, ungratified mother; a brother who drinks and ignores his serene wife and attractive home; a nephew who will take his life and that of his infant son. But during one of Frances's rare stretches of depression when there's a ""stone in her chest,"" she realizes how much she misses Karel--the only lover she ever loved--a man impossibly beset by a shrewish wife, children and supplicants of all kinds. And after returning to the Midlands of her childhood (Drabble's command of commonplace detail is knowing--there are marvelous contrasts here and throughout), Frances finds that in spite of all her itinerant freedom she still can't quite cut herself off from the past and its institutions. In a notorious rebuke to modern times, her distant great-aunt has starved to death alone in her cottage; Frances appropriates the old homeplace and at the end, she's happily presiding over a menage of her own children as well as Karel's and Karel himself. Margaret Drabble is the only writer we can think of who uses experience and social commentary almost interchangeably and always to astute and entertaining advantage. After all, years ago she anticipated the whole feminist movement, although she's much too clear-eyed and honest to indulge in any of its bitchy grievances. Her human data has always been superb and now, how readily she succeeds in informing the mind and engaging the heart in a season which has rewarded neither. Realms of Gold is a conspicuous pleasure to read--a cheerful reconciliation of the exactions of the past and the possibilities that lie just ahead. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Margaret Drabble was born on June 5, 1939 in Sheffield, England. She attended The Mount School in York and Newnham College, Cambridge University. After graduation, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford during which time she understudied for Vanessa Redgrave.

She is a novelist, critic, and the editor of the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Her works include A Summer Bird Cage; The Millstone, which won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in 1966; Jerusalem the Golden, which won James Tait Black Prize in 1967; and The Witch of Exmoor. She also received the E. M. Forster award and was awarded a Society of Authors Travelling Fellowship in the 1960s and the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1980.

(Bowker Author Biography)