No doubt this author is acquainted with prototypic, strong, female protagonists who forge identities socially beyond maternal and marital bonds.

Fly Away Home recalls Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929); parallels, however, are perhaps nowhere clearer than between Piercy's Daria, and Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House (1879). Like Nora, Daria is demeaned and patronized by a husband who keeps her "in the dark"; like Nora, she learns of his unscrupulous, contemptuous treatment of others in the name of profiteering; therefore, although both find it painful to leave the domesticity each loves, leave they do.

Piercy's Fly Away Home has been likened, also, to the work of "Meridel LeSueur and other Socialist writers of the 1930's," as she "attempts to deal directly with what she sees as the pressing issues of American life: class struggle, gentrification, the emotional impoverishment of the...