SOURCE: "A Woman Scorned," in New York Times, June 11, 1995, p. 48.

In the following review, Harris applauds Weldon's ability to "unsentimentally" further the cause of "oppressed" heroines.

Fay Weldon's latest beleaguered heroine hears voices in her head. Over the years since the publication of her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke, in 1967, Ms. Weldon has given her abandoned, impoverished wives some extraordinary weapons to employ against the husbands who have left them for someone nicer, younger, prettier or more suitable. To be effective, all of these weapons (which have included witchcraft and chocolate cake) have required brains, imagination and a single-minded, self-serving capacity for revenge and vindication. None have ever been so exotic or so marvelously contrived as the multiple personality with which Ms. Weldon has endowed Angelica White in her 20th novel, Splitting.

At 17 years of age, the lovely Angelica is about to become compliant, docile, passive: she...