Penelope Shuttle's work focuses on the difficulties of human relationships, especially erotic relationships, in the modern age. A poet as well as a novelist, she is an author whose interests spring from the great revolution in personal life-styles in the 1960s and 1970s, especially from the changing status of women. At the same time much of her fiction must be seen in relation to the distinguished twentieth-century tradition of mythopoetic analysis, whose practitioners include Joseph Campbell and Robert Graves. By exploring the subconscious, at times supernatural, forces which drive her characters in their attempts to find satisfaction with each other and to understand truly their needs and desires, she directly confronts the dangers and the power of underlying human psychology. The extreme sensitivity of her perceptions is reflected in the highly poetic prose of her novels. Her feminist and poetically symbolic novels have attracted attention from a small...