SOURCE: Swaab, Peter. “Revolution's Leavings.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4998 (15 January 1999): 21.

In the following review, Swaab observes that Fair Exchange is intricately plotted with vivid descriptions of women's everyday lives, but that it is overly didactic in conveying its feminist message.

Fair Exchange sets its narrative confusions in the convulsions of revolutionary England and France. The action takes place between the late 1780s and 1810, and is suggested by the coincidence that both William Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft conceived illegitimate children in post-revolutionary France. Wordsworth's nephew and biographer, Christopher, described this in 1851 as a time when “the most licentious theories were propounded” and “all restraints were broken”: Michèle Roberts's intricately plotted story dramatizes the scope of new freedoms and continuing restraints in the lives and loves of a group of women based on Wollstonecraft and Annette Vallon (Wordsworth's French mistress), and on their serving women, Louise and Daisy, unenfranchised...