Jane Rogers has established a reputation as a writer of novels that deal uncompromisingly with raw emotions in a variety of settings. Although most of her work is set in contemporary England, she is becoming increasingly interested in exploring historical settings. Her early novels, Separate Tracks (1983) and Her Living Image (1984), both use an intense style to examine the inner lives of her female protagonists. The latter won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award in 1985. The Ice is Singing (1987) chronicles the thoughts of a runaway woman in a series of bleak and graphically described urban and rural landscapes. Mr. Wroe's Virgins (1991), which she also used as the basis for a television play, takes an historical account of a religious cult in early-nineteenth-century Lancashire, using the voices of the eponymous acolytes to tell the story of oppression in the midst of political upheaval. Her most recent work, Promised Lands (1995), employs a...