Marilyn French has written her second political novel, which is to say that the actions of the characters in both books are intended to demonstrate an ideological point of view. There was an almost documentary quality to The Women's Room, the long, widely-read first novel, which dramatized in two sections a rage-filled fundamentalist feminism. (p. 1)

Polemical though it was, The Women's Room had its strengths. Its energy from start to finish derived from true fury. And in the beginning the very voice of the narrator who walks along the Maine shore seemed to me quite fine.

This very validity is what is missing in The Bleeding Heart. Where the rage was fresh in the first novel, it seems indulgent here. The women in suburbia were crying into real dishwater. This heroine [Dolores] is merely pretentious. (pp. 1-2)

I am myself a feminist and am affronted by three major...