Erica Jong is too fine a writer to care much about the accidental categories of the activists, categories that are a product of crippled imaginations. If Ms. Jong wrote a novel with a male protagonist-narrator, I would pick it up with respect and in the expectation of entertainment and even of enlightenment…. [She] has extrapolated from her own life and her own fear an archetype that has had immense appeal, not only with the MAF [Modern American Female], but also with the Modern European Woman.

In her new novel, Erica Jong has refused to capitalize on an outlook and an ambience that a less scrupulous writer could have exploited forever…. Her title Fanny, as well as the afterword, acknowledges a measure of indebtedness to John Cleland's erotic masterpiece, Fanny Hill, but the book is neither a pastiche nor a parody. It is, despite its allegiance to an antique...