Maureen Duffy's writing, in the many genres she has attempted, reflects both her involvement in contemporary society and her uneasy place in the English social system, as a Socialist, a lesbian, and an artist aware of her illegitimate and working-class origins. Her work, with its ambitious range, its versatility, and its vitality of language, is impressive. Her best novels are characterized by their brilliancy of style, their elegance of structural form, and their ability to suggest questions that haunt the mind. Several of her novels have received both critical and popular acclaim in Great Britain and the United States, but her fiction has not yet secured a large and widespread readership.

Duffy was born in Worthing, Sussex, to Grace Wright and Cahia P. Duffy, into an environment proletarian and impoverished. Her autobiographical first novel, That's How It Was (1962), describes the combination of maternal affection and material deprivation she...