Although Margaret Drabble began to use the third-person narrator in her next two novels, these can be seen as transitional in that the point of view is still limited mainly or totally to that of the female protagonist. Jerusalem the Golden is the first of Drabble's novels not to be written in the first-person, but the narrative keeps so closely to the point of view of Clara Maugham, its main character, that the effect is almost that of another first-person text. Drabble has spoken of the failings of the other early heroines, such as Emma Evans's wildness and Rosamund's ‘dryness of the spirit’, but she has made much harsher comments about Clara ('I don't like her very much. I think she's my most unsympathetic heroine, in many ways - she's an elitist at heart’) even though she might seem at first reading merely to be a more provincial version of the observant Sarah Bennett. But Clara is a little more limited, selfish and unimaginative than her predecessors, and her initiation into wider experiences does not necessarily make her a nicer person.

Some years later, in 1974, Drabble wrote a biography of Arnold Bennett, whose work she had always admired: she wrote it ‘in a partisan spirit, as an act of appreciation’ (AB vii) and acknowledges ‘my own debt to Bennett in Jerusalem the Golden’ (AB 47-8), which she feels was strongly influenced by the same kind of attitudes. Clara was much like the typical Bennett character, especially Hilda Lessways, being intent on escape and ready for adventure and new experiences - Drabble adds ‘my novel is almost as much an appreciation of Bennett as this book is meant to be’ (AB 48).

The focalization on Clara, representing the world as seen by her, expressing her anxieties and misgivings, tends to engage the reader's sympathy for her. One or two comments are directed at Clara within the narrative, as mentioned below, but these are unobtrusive and easily overlooked. Chance, also seen as luck, is important in this novel. Clara refers to her luck in escaping her background: her family is a repressive lower-class unit, dominated by a mother who is the first of the monster- mothers who also loom over the childhoods of Kate Armstrong and Liz Headleand. Unlike the chilly, frigid, pretentious mothers of Jane Gray, Simon Camish or Frances Wingate, Mrs Maugham is embittered, domineering and confrontational.