I thought Final Payments was foolishly overpraised—Isabel's friends and lovers were lukewarm dumplings, and Gordon had no flair for writing about sex—but the first sixty pages or so had a weight and assurance rare in a first novel. When Gordon wrote about Isabel's love for her father, the prose was hushed, unforced; the sturdy sentences themselves seemed to shoulder grief. Once Isabel dragged her questing soul out into the real world, the novel became weary and contrived; Gordon flogged the book along until, dazed with exhaustion, it collapsed in a whimpering heap. Curious, then, that Gordon was compared—favorably!—with that master of poise and flowing music, Jane Austen. Austen never showed such strain.

Yet Jane Austen will probably be pressed into service again with the publication of The Company of Women; indeed, Gordon courts such comparisons. Felicitas, the precocious heroine of Gordon's novel, is slipped...