["Fanny"] is a literary prodigy. It reaches back to an earlier century for its very life: language, spirit and shape…. Miss Jong is reported to have begun her book by wondering: What if Tom Jones had been a woman? The question is irresistible. It made me wonder whether to begin this review with an immovable answer: Erica Jong is not Henry Fielding. But that answer will not do. The fearful collision of these novelists has resulted, not in an impasse, but in an explosion, a surge of literary energy. (p. 1)

A perverse epic in prose, then. Earnest, not mock-heroic. Our first-person heroine has literary ambitions—and a mind, as she frequently tells us….

An entertaining novel, but also a novel of ideas. I do not mean merely that references to Shaftesbury and Mandeville, Voltaire and Locke, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld are bandied about at the drop of a...