SOURCE: "Soft Machines," in New Statesman and Society, Vol. 95, No. 2449, February 24, 1978, p. 258.

In the following review, Clapp calls Little Sisters "glittering" and "witty."

Fay Weldon's latest novel [Little Sisters] is by turns hectoring, funny, astute and artificial. Full of dreadful warnings relating to the 'black pool of desire and destiny' awash in women, it delivers its moral messages with a depersonalised urgency, variously shrinking or swelling its characters into embodiments of fairy-tale oppositions: they are chiefly distinguished by being either old or young, rich or poor, barren or fertile; all use sex for the 'sharing out of privilege'.

The interest of Little Sisters lies not in its components but in the cleverness with which these are manouvered. An exotically grisly account of Sixties London kookery, in which men wore toupees woven from pubic hair, manufacture navel gems and send ugly sisters hurtling from windows, is pitted against a...