The glancing indirection of Beryl Bainbridge's writing, its waywardness and humor, owes something to Firbank and, further back, to Sterne, but she is a genuine original, with a macabre imagination and a wonderful gift for catching tones of speech, whether the people talking are the creepy little girls of Harriet Said …, the besotted young woman and her lover in Sweet William, or heavy-weight Freda and lean Brenda in The Bottle Factory Outing. Nobody else is so dashingly offhand in telling us only what she feels we need to know for the purposes of her story, or is able to mix comedy and horror with such assurance.

A reading of Bainbridge's work might begin with Harriet Said [(1972)] … and continue with The Bottle Factory Outing (1974). The adroit plotting of the first book places the suppressed lesbian relationship of two schoolgirls in the foreground of the story while making us uneasily...