"In a way I admire her, she gets through the days." That is what Margaret Atwood's characters do—get through the days. In other stories by other writers, these characters would commit suicide or join support groups and we would be forced to recognize them as contemporary victims/heroines….

Margaret Atwood does not write that kind of story. She looks deeper and sees more clearly and she insists that the reader see as well. The stories in "Dancing Girls" are painful and subtle, for Atwood's characters do not thrash but suffer quietly in ways they do not quite understand. Most are women too alone to realize their own aloneness….

Each is unsure of herself as a woman, somehow incomplete. They suffer from wounds too deep to acknowledge and they give off the desperation of the unloved.

Though Atwood's characters yearn for love, they suffer from an odd insistence...