Christine Brooke-Rose is typically described as a "European intellectual," one who is capable through her education and interests of bridging gaps between cultures--this at a time when English culture seems particularly hostile to foreign concerns. It is Brooke-Rose on whom the Times of London calls when it needs an essay on contemporary French writing for a special supplement on France. But her efforts to make accessible French critical thought and to integrate into her fiction innovations associated with the French "new novelists" are largely unknown to her countrymen. She is one of those literary outsiders whom the English can tolerate, even respect, and then simply ignore. (The "Great Tradition" of English realism--as defined by contemporary English novelists and critics alike--is so narrow as to preclude most foreigners [Conrad excepted] as well as all those concerned with "experimental" narrative technique that might be labeled as foreign: hence Joyce, Beckett...