The Needle's Eye is seen as marking a watershed in Margaret Drabble's writing; it focuses the action mainly through the eyes of a male character, Simon Camish, but also large parts of the narrative are focalized upon Simon's new friend, Rose Vassiliou, and more occasionally on various minor characters, glimpsed as leading their own full lives which occasionally intersect with those of the protagonists. The attachment to the single female protagonist is broken, and Drabble had achieved her ambition to write in the omniscient third-person narrator, moving flexibly among the minds of different characters. This is something like the method that appears in her later work, but she refers back to The Needle's Eye from within one of these later discursive novels, self-referentially, as being ‘the old-fashioned, Freudian, psychological novel’(Gl 461) in contrast to the freer, looser structure of her later work.

Also, perhaps as a natural progression, in The Needle's Eye Drabble gives some sense of a wider social perspective, where British society is shown in a more comparative and analytic way, pursuing the contrast between ways of life that Rosamund had begun to perceive in The Millstone. This contrast is represented initially by Simon's awareness of his own climb from grim poverty to his affluent lifestyle as a barrister. Then, reversing this, there is the depiction of Rose's deliberate rejection of her own wealthy upbringing to settle in a decaying terraced house in a deprived, unfashionable area of north London.

Again the structure of the novel is dualistic. As Sarah observed Louise's drama, and as Jane Gray split herself into the observed and the observer, here Simon observes the drama of Rose's life. The two meet at a dinner party, then the histories of both are told, mainly in the silent reminiscences of one or the other, but also, in Rose's case, in her own embedded narrative to Simon. An unwilling heiress, Rose had earlier achieved some notoriety in the media because she married Christopher Vassiliou in spite of her father's strenuous efforts to stop her. Rose then gained further notoriety by giving away her inheritance: as a child, neglected by her parents, she was influenced by a religious fundamentalist nursemaid, Noreen, and has grown up to hate wealth.