Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.