There are women novelists and novelists who happen to be women. Fay Weldon belongs in the first of these categories…. I have nothing against women novelists … [but] I prefer novels about the human predicament to ones exclusively about the female one.

In Puffball there are a number of chapters headed 'Inside Liffey'…. These chapters are full of … gynaecological details…. It would be unjust to declare pages of such information to be irrelevant, since Miss Weldon's theme is clearly the tyranny of women's biological functions.

Among the majority of women of the world—as among the majority of the men—this tyranny is, of course, chiefly one of the stomach…. But even if that tyranny of the stomach were to be the subject of a novel, a minute description of digestive processes might well begin to pall, even while making its wholly valid point. That Miss Weldon makes her...