In Perfect Happiness Penelope Lively concerns herself with the subject of loss. This, so often in the past, has proved a dangerous subject, particularly in the hands of women writers. It induces characters with that modern disease of scurrying to find themselves, and delivering us with the unedited findings. It deprives many a writer of all humour.

Miss Lively has achieved a considerable triumph, therefore, in managing to cross such tricky terrain without so much as a stumble. In her exploration of three different kinds of loss, while shirking no gloomy corner, she engages nothing but respect and admiration for her heroines. Her art is to examine their various plights with great sympathy, yet never to swop her role of writer for that of psychiatrist.

Frances Brooklyn, middle-aged and recently widowed, has a practical approach to bereavement. It is, of course, something to be endured, suffered, lived through...