Pat Barker is a nearly pure novelist: she writes no short stories, no poetry, but, beginning with her first novel, Union Street (1982), immediately declared herself as a major novelist. In the following year she appeared on Granta's list of the "Twenty...

Violence haunts Pat Barker's fiction. It darkens the lives of the women in Union Street, the book that established her reputation in 1983 as a working-class, feminist author. It stalks the prostitutes in Blow Your House Down in the shape of a serial...

Pat Barker is one of Britain's most accomplished living novelists. She won the Booker Prize for the final volume of what is widely viewed to be her masterpiece, the Regeneration trilogy, comprising the novels Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The...

In the following excerpt from a review in which she also discusses Caryl Phillips's novel Cambridge (1992), Pierpont favorably assesses Regeneration.

An ocean away from the fights of early '80s British feminism, I found [Union Street] direct, subtle, and devastating. If the feminist overview was occasionally routine, the undertaking itself was far from it, and the tone far from obvious. Barker was sympathetic, but as she tallied the willingness of woman after woman to let fate make decisions, to play by the rules of class as well as society—never to complain, never to ask for help, never to leave—there were flashes of frustration, of...

Being hailed as "Lawrentian" might thrill some new writers, but not Pat Barker…. [Her novel may be] the latest, long over-due working-class masterpiece, but its story and sympathies are firmly based on the lives of working-class women, not men. And for that, as Barker ruefully says, there is next to no literary tradition. It was Angela Carter who recognised the talent and singularity of Barker's writing, and helped nurse Union Street into life. Prejudice about working-class and f...