SOURCE: Craig, Amanda. “Passion & Physics.” New Statesman 10, no. 435 (10 January 1997): 47.

In the following excerpt, Craig presents a favorable assessment of Kennedy's subtle and effective prose in Original Bliss, commenting that it “is regrettable that Kennedy will probably be read solely by women.”

Anyone who reads fiction knows there is a male canon and a female one. Perhaps the present-day preference for Amis or Atwood is simply a matter of temperament, or perhaps it goes back to Richardson and Fielding and the masculine assertion for sense over sensibility. Yet the true reader, like the true writer, is concerned with more than gender; and to hide behind it is to render us something less than human.

Jeanette Winterson and A L Kennedy are two of the leading writers of the new generation. Both are female and have won many prizes. One has gone from wild popularity as an outspoken lesbian to...