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...

In the following excerpt, Birch favorably assesses Barker's use of language and insights into her characters' lives in The Man Who Wasn't There.

Pat Barker's extraordinary first novel, "Union Street," deserved every bit of the high praise heaped on it…. Set in England's grim and grimy Northeast, its seven loosely linked chapters offer a vision of working-class women's lives that is mordant, heartbreaking and—at least to my knowledge—unique…. Delicately and compassionately, Mrs. Barker caught the central contradiction of her heroines' lives, which is that they believe in female inf...

In the following positive review of The Century's Daughter, Christgau argues that Barker's themes are well served by the novel's flashback structure.

["Union Street"] is set in the early 1970's in an unnamed city in England's industrial Northeast. The impoverished, grimy town has two basic industries: the steelworks, from which the men are frequently furloughed or prematurely retired, and the cake factory, where many of the women work or have worked. Miss Barker skillfully employs the factory setting to touch on matters like automation, race prejudice, feeblemindedness and the sheer human hardship experienced by some of those ...

Jamie is a Scottish poet, dramatist, and critic. In the following review of The Man Who Wasn't There, she applauds Barker's ability to draw interesting characters but suggests that the novel's plot is somewhat confusing.

Pat Barker achieves immediate distinction with Union Street. Into the jaded, overcrowded, imitative world of first novels she has introduced a book that is at once mature, faultlessly constructed, and daring enough to take as its subject life itself in the most elemental sense: poverty, sexuality, rape, pregnancy, abortion, marriage, birth, sickness, prostitution, decrepitude and death, all interlocking. Where a less gifted writer might have fallen headlong here into the double trap of stridency and mawkish...

Barker has the rare ability to communicate the physical, to make one feel her characters living, feel "the blood squeezing through [their] veins" in the way that Lawrence wanted for his own characters. Her first book [Union Street] is an almost hellish cycle of seven stories about the working-class women who live along the Union Street of the title, in an unnamed city in the North of England. But sex is more important than class here. Barker writes about a crucial stage in the life of a differ...

[Union Street] is lost in that sometimes interesting but always dangerous area that looms invitingly between literature and the social worker's casebook. Although direct echoes of Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend find their way into the composition, and a vision of plain women as heroic stoics reminiscent of Gertrude Stein in Three Lives dominates the thought behind the novel, the reader is left with the uneasy feeling that the author is not quite comfortable w...

[Union Street] is a product of the grim wasteland of England's industrial northeast. It is the hard winter of 1973; a miner's strike amplifies a landscape of gray drizzle, physical and spiritual impoverishment. Against this background seven women enact their individual rites of passage…. When it was published in Britain it was called feminist, proletarian, socialist-realist; Lawrencian, Osbornian, Sillitoe-esque…. There are those who've found it too grim and gritty, and th...

Barker's characters may sound less like material for serious drama than a shelfload of case histories, but Barker details the particularities of each life so richly and carefully that she cannot be mistaken for either a dry sociologist or a sentimental reporter. Some readers may object that Barker has made her characters laugh with such bitter humor, that one cannot help but yearn for some illusion of a possible escape. But her vision is as unremitting as the world she describes, and her hard, spare ...

The seven narratives of Pat Barker's Union Street are … solidly linked. Each deals with a woman living in an English working-class city street in the North East, during the winter of the miner's strike…. No grim detail is avoided …, and no idiom goes unnoted…. An authorial voice, which speaks of 'stoicism' and 'horror,' makes sure we are moved. The result is a serious, well-meant, gripping set of case-histories, but not a novel.