Anne Duchêne

Initial New York reviewers were unenthusiastic, calling this book thin-blooded or disappointing. On its Virago re-appearance in 1981, the word was radiant. Anne Duchêne placed it at the opposite pole from Stead's recent...

This novel won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year award. Anne Duchene in the Times Literary Supplement suspected it of some odd and regrettable compulsions towards up-to-dateness. The film made from it did better...

A sentence from Anne Duchêne , reviewing this book for the Times Literary Supplement, reads like a summary of responses to PF : Her writing, as ever, has a natural authority, is very funny...

In the Times Literary SupplementAnn Duchene greeted this book with enthusiasm. Most of the time, she wrote, the story moves seamlessly, governed by a vivid, confident pen and by a generous intelligence. The book...

Opinions used to advertise this volume included one from Elaine Feinstein , who called JGa spare and elegant master of her art.Anne Duchêne , however, provided an unusually unenthusiastic...

Anne Duchêne in the Times Literary Supplement described the book as mildly amazing, today, in being a high sexual fantasy, postulating female submission to men. Though ultimately trivial, it is spirited, if silly, stuff...

Anne Duchêne , too, expressed admiration for this weirdly laborious, gothic story, calling it a sombre panel, a long and painful expressionist essay, with really only three—or two and a half—characters. She reserved her highest...

Thirty years after publication, Anne Duchêne , also in the Times Literary Supplement, recorded her delight in this iridescent comedy. Stead, she suggested, was a kind of dark star among modern novelists—not visible...

Anne Duchêne called this book, on its appearance as a Virago Modern Classic in 1981, dark, demonic, almost unrelievedly ugly, a rancid and claustrophobic criticising of capitalism, and of what it does to human emotions...