Barbara Brothers

Recent critics, such as Barbara Brothers and Beauman , have re-read the novel for its focus on the portrayal of women and their lives in fiction, to find it one of Kennedy's more substantive and...

While Kennedy seriously engages with social and gender issues, once again exploring, through Florence, the woman's dilemma in marriage, the action and tone of the novel is at times melodramatic. Dictionary of Literary Biography author...

The Times Literary Supplement reviewer described the ending as one of terror and hopeless tragedy.Brothers , writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, judges Kennedy's attempts to foreground social dilemmas as ultimately...

Brothers does not agree with this perception of humour: she finds that while the characters and the situation seem made for comedy . . . instead of comedy Kennedy writes a banal, tragic melodrama.

Brothers observes how MK 's use of multiple voices through which to narrate the novel make[s] for rounded characters and build[s] suspense.The Feast was both a Literary Guild Society choice and a Book...

Friend and fellow author Marghanita Laski praised the novel, and specifically MK 's depiction of Oxford life through the flashbacks that Lucy and her best friend, Melissa, have on their university days. The novel was...

Brothers finds these novels often over-ambitious.

Brothers sees MK 's work as an apology for her own fiction and an attack upon critics and reviewers who would dismiss her as being merely a popular writer.