SOURCE: “Fighting Motherhood,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 10, 1991, p. 20.

In the following review, Dalley asserts that The Battle for Christabel is more of a case-study than a novel, and applauds the impact of the work.

Isobel, the narrator of Margaret Forster's new novel, The Battle for Christabel, has a problem. Her closest and dottiest friend, Rowena, although without job, husband, and anything that convention or good sense dictates, decides to have a baby. For such an ineffectual character, she organizes it rather carefully, choosing for the father a man who is sure to absent himself, who will never know about the child, and—this for reasons of her own sexual preference—who is black. Isobel's pleas, threats and dire warnings make no difference, and she herself becomes intimately involved, from the moment when she measures the drops of pregnancy-testing solution into a test-tube, to the day, some six...