Although in one sense a complete departure for Brown, Dolley obviously picks up some elements of the author's style and preoccupations that can be witnessed in her earlier works. The biographical element is not entirely new to Brown's repertoire as evidenced by her thinly-veiled portrait of Martina Navratilova in her 1983 novel Sudden Death. This time, however, none of the names have been changed and the novel is strongly based in historical fact. The historical grounding and painstaking research of Dolley also forms tenuous links with Brown's 1986 novel High Hearts, a fictional love story set against the backdrop of the Civil War. This latter novel also clearly deals thematically with the concept of being a woman in a men's world, and takes the ideal of equality to its logical extreme as Geneva, the novel's heroine, dresses up as a man and joins her husband on the battlefield...