Margaret Atwood's first collection of short stories [Dancing Girls] … centres on the relationships between men and women…. Atwood writes mainly of the struggles between men and women, of painful failures and of equally painful readjustments. Atwood's women tend to suffer the most in these relationships; their male friends have affairs, or simply leave them, and the women have to shore up their defences just to get by…. [Atwood's stories] range in tone from cool detachment, to suppressed hysteria, to the lightly ironic and humorous. And Atwood's considerable ability as a poet is often evident in the stories in the vividness of phrasing and imagery. The use of suggestive imagery to convey meaning is in fact one of the most distinctive features of the best stories—'Under Glass' and 'Polarities,' for instance.
By the standard of Atwood's own best fiction—Surfacing, that is—Dancing Girls is a reasonably good, but not major work. It may be unfair or even inappropriate to compare a collection of short stories with a novel, but none of the stories has the reach or depth of Surfacing. Further, many if not most short-story collections are of uneven quality, and Atwood's is no exception; her stories, it is true, do not differ radically in quality, but distinctions between them can be made. The stories of sexual politics, nearly all told in the first person from the woman's point of view, achieve varying degrees of success. 'Under Glass,' for instance, is successful because the narrator is fully individualized, and, even as she considers that ultimate defence of Atwood's heroines, withdrawal and a retreat from all pain, she shows an appealing sense of humor. In 'The Grave of the Famous Poet,' on the other hand, the central situation is simply never brought to life. The story portrays the typical Atwood battle: the characters fight for the role of victim, establish a truce, resume the battle. The format is familiar, but we never really see the characters; they never become individualized, realized, alive. (pp. 329-30)
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