Eva Figes is both a novelist of distinction and a writer of one of the classic texts of the women's movement, Patriarchal Attitudes (1970). In each capacity she can be seen to have defined herself against and to have questioned the traditional politics and pieties of the culture in which she lives. The 1960s and 1970s were decades in which many gifted younger writers turned against the realistic conventions of the immediate postwar British novel. For them, these conventions seemed cozily irrelevant. Figes's history has provided her with a unique viewpoint from which to focus and criticize that irrelevance, and from which to fund an alternative and innovative view of the novel's function.

Eva Figes was born Eva Unger in Berlin--a year before Hitler's rise to power--to Emil Eduard and Irma Cohen Unger, well-to-do German Jews. The elder of two children, she had a typically comfortable, culturally assimilated, upper-middle-class...