Author: Margaret Drabble Title: The millstone Title-explanation: The main character of the book, Rosamund, gets pregnant, but she won\'t merry the father. A baby is a big responsibility, and it gets even harder if you have to do it all by yourself. So some of Rosamunds friends look upon the baby as a millstone round Rosamunds neck: they suggest an abortion or having the baby adopted. She saw the baby also as something impossible for her, at first. But Rosamund decides to accept her situation and begins to enjoy it when she realises that the baby will give her a new purpose in life. Publisher: Wolters-Noordhoff BV => the Blackbirds of 1995 Date of publication: 1995 Date of first publication: 1965 Summary: Rosamund Stacey is a young woman living alone in an apartment in London. She\'s afraid of having sex with a boy. Rosamund goes out with two men: Roger Anderson and Joe Hurt. Roger thinks Rosamund makes love with Joe and the other way around. But she just made love once, to George, a homosexual. When she discovers she is pregnant, she wants to \'kill\' the baby at first.  But when she doesn\'t succeed, she decides to keep the baby, although her friends think she\'s out of her mind. Now she has to give lessons to earn some money and she also has to visit the midwife often. She meets all kind of woman who are pregnant and they surprise her. When her baby, Octavia, has born she feels very happy, especially when she laughs at her. But when she gets sick and has to have a heart operation, she gets very worried. Everything went well, but when she isn\'t allowed to visit her, she screams and cries until they let her visit Octavia. Because her parents will stay another year in India, she\'s able to live in their apartment and she takes a housemate so she has a friend and someone who can help her with the baby. When she meets George, she invites him, but doesn\'t tell him she\'s his kid. She realises she can\'t live with George, she only wants to live together with Octavia. Characters: The main character is Rosamund Stacey. She\'s a young woman and very unsure on having sex. But after she finally slept with someone, she becomes pregnant. First she doesn\'t want to get the baby and she almost listens to her friends. But she decides to keep the baby, also because of her loneliness and her love grows and she comes to like the whole situation. When the baby is born, she\'s comes to care a great deal about it and she is glad she made the right decision. Setting: London, it\'s not very important. Point of view: It\'s told by Rosamund herself, so in the first person. It\'s told afterwards. Theme: It\'s all about her pregnancy and how that changes everything in her life: the way you feel, the way you look upon things and others. The way you behave. And especially pregnancy of a young academic woman. Genre: Psychological novel. The Millstone describes Rosamund\'s acceptance of an enormous change in her life which first embarrasses her but later turns out to enrich her life. Writer\'s biography: Margareth Drabble was born in 1939, in Sheffield, Yorkshire. She began writing after leaving Cambridge Univ.; novels are all thematically concerned with development of characters toward maturity through experiences of love, marriage, and motherhood; novels include \'The Summer Bird-cage\' (1963), \'The Needle\'s Eye\' (1972), \'The Ice Age\' (1977), and \'The Middle Ground\' (1980).