During her period of most concentrated literary activity, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Rosemary Tonks wrote fierce yet humorous novels about the difficulties and small triumphs of British women looking for social, financial, and sexual independence. Unlike other female writers of her generation who joined the women's liberation movement in response to the restrictions they and their female protagonists experienced, Tonks ultimately chose, for her protagonists and for herself, to defy conventional social restrictions on women and then to renounce them totally. Her poems detail the more personal, anguished aspects of this struggle from her own point of view. In these same poems her detailed descriptions of her beloved city, London, established her in the eyes of many as “the poet of the modern metropolis,” like the poet she most admired, Charles Baudelaire.

Writing novels in a highly personal style that at times approaches the...