SOURCE: Doughty, Louise. “Medium with a Message.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4540 (6 April 1990): 375.

In the following review, Doughty comments that the different narrative voices of In the Red Kitchen are unified by common themes, contending that the book is “a truly post-feminist novel.”

“I always loved men more than women. It is hard to love women. They want far too much.” These are the thoughts of Flora Milk, a Victorian medium who conjures the spirits of the dead in her Hackney kitchen to the delight, surprise and scepticism of assembled pampered ladies and scientific gents. The character of Flora Milk is based on a real-life mystic, Florence Cook, although in In the Red Kitchen Michèle Roberts has adapted the details. More fictional but none the less real to the reader are Hat, Pharaoh's daughter, who speaks of her life in ancient Egypt, and Hattie, a twentieth-century cookery writer...