[Union Street] is lost in that sometimes interesting but always dangerous area that looms invitingly between literature and the social worker's casebook. Although direct echoes of Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend find their way into the composition, and a vision of plain women as heroic stoics reminiscent of Gertrude Stein in Three Lives dominates the thought behind the novel, the reader is left with the uneasy feeling that the author is not quite comfortable with fiction as the appropriate milieu for her enterprise. The result is a heavily 'committed' version of the seven ages of women embedded in a portrait of a working-class street in a North of England industrial city in the 1970s.

Each of the seven representative women is allotted a section of her own, but the separate stories interlock and all contribute to the overall themes of inevitable suffering and unremarked...