Like many other women writers of the 1970s, Gail Godwin focuses sharply on the relationships of men and women who find their roles no longer clearly delineated by tradition and their freedom yet strange and not entirely comfortable. But unlike many other contemporary women writers, her themes outreach the general feminist preoccupation with What They Did To Us. She explores the complexity of relationships, the conflict and complicity of them. She is more appropriately placed with Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Edith Wharton (all of whom she admires) than with Doris Lessing or Joyce Carol Oates. She writes from the tradition of "the realistic novel which deals with people trying to understand their lives and live them fully," and she has written incisively of the relationship between the artist's life and her art, notably in her most recent novel Violet Clay (1978). Her development as a novelist can be...