Drabble was married to actor Clive Swift between 1960 and 1975; they have three children, including the gardener and TV personality Joe Swift, the academic Adam Swift, and a daughter, Rebecca Swift, who runs The Literary Consultancy [REF].
Drabble has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, A. S. Byatt, over her alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels Byatt had planned to write about herself.