Here is the sound of an author tipping her hand: "She turned, as always, to analysis, being a twentieth century woman and so subject to the superstition that what the mind could understand couldn't any longer hurt the heart, that what the tongue could utter was in the hand's control." It is the sound of an author urgently ordering and overruling her character, laboring to construct a sense of agon—contest, choice—when the evidence is already in and the outcome safely determined. This tone dominates Marilyn French's second novel, "The Bleeding Heart," and that is regrettable, because Miss French speaks to urgent issues between men and women, between what she sees as the unarmed individual and an oppressive society.

That she "speaks to them" at all, instead of embodying them is, however, the problem: Miss French has the soul of a polemicist nobly and earnestly gotten up...