It was useful for Drabble's subsequent reputation that A Summer Bird-Cage caught the public's imagination, raising issues of female self-assertion and autonomy. This novel was published in 1962: typically of its time, it sees marriage as almost inevitable for a woman (by 1973, in contrast, Frances Wingate in The Realms of Gold can hardly contemplate the idea of a two-parent family any longer).

It is worth looking in some detail at this plot, as Drabble wrote it spontaneously and without a plan, ‘as if writing a long letter’. The titles of its eleven chapters (which include ‘The Wedding’, ‘The Reception’, ‘The Invitation’, ‘The Party’, ‘The Next Invitation’, ‘The Next Party’) mark the temporal unfolding of the plot, which is in fact very simple. Sarah Bennett, the first- person narrator, is enduring a year in a kind of limbo after leaving university, suffering the double affliction of being unable to decide what to do with her life, and of being separated from her boy friend Francis who is spending the year on a scholarship in America.

The novel begins with her coming to her parents’ house to be a bridesmaid, as her beautiful, antagonistic sister Louise is marrying an unlikeable novelist, Stephen Halifax. Over the next few months, Sarah gradually discovers that her sister is - and probably was already - having an affair with John Connell, actor and best man at the wedding. Almost as soon as Sarah pieces all this together, Louise's marriage abruptly ends: Stephen catches her with John and throws her out. Looking back from what must be about six months later, Sarah tells us ‘As I sit here, typing these last few pages’, that Louise is rather provisionally living with John, and Sarah herself is looking forward to marrying Francis, soon to return as the year is over.

Short though it is, the novel has a double plot, sliding between Sarah and Louise. Marriage, the main theme, is described in the Webster passage from which the title phrase comes (The White Devil, Act I scene 2) as like a summer bird-cage, where the birds outside try to get in, and those inside try to get out.