Fay Weldon has a dashing, unconventional way of writing a novel; but there is something familiar about Female Friends. "Female friends" is a favourite locution of Thackeray's. I took down Philip, to check, and found much else in common…. Both authors are fond of the present tense, of chatting to the reader, of offering little homilies. Thackeray also sometimes puts his dialogue in the form of a dramatic script, just as Fay Weldon does. Their subject-matter is similar, too: the sufferings of women, particularly at the hands of other women, their mothers and their female friends. This has been an enjoyable theme for certain male writers since Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women.

In Female Friends, the women who need to beware of each other are called Grace, Marjorie and Chloe (the narrator). Girls of very different backgrounds with very different—and most interesting—mothers, they come together in...