The novel makes clear that Drabble does not only mean her characters' personal pasts; she means their collective past.

"I said, 'Why don't you let the country confront its collective past.' "

Maria/Stuart focuses on an unhappy family as they struggle with their collective past.

I recalled so many talks like this one in our collective past.

Mutes, for some reason rooted deep in their collective past, were only active between sunrise and sunset.

Their collective past: the war which had preceded their immediate era, its consequences.

With the flood waters rising, the campesinos question their personal and collective past.

He is a stranger among them who probably knows more about their collective past than any one of them.

In the absence of any family identity, they tried to reconstruct a collective past.

Do the new Western historians really intend to portray our collective past as a disaster?