My specific aim in writing this novel was to present an anti-heroine in response to all the anti-heroes so popular of the day, beginning with Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, and all the anti-heroes who followed in their wake. Loosely bound together as Angry Young Men, they hit out at everything phony, pompous, priggish, prudish, and pretentious. Their anger was exhilarating. To their delight (and to his later embarrassment), Somerset Maugham called them “scum.” Creating the female counterpart I knew would be tricky, as in those days when relationships between men and women were at an all-time low, females were depicted as passive and put-upon. (Then came the ’70s—Gloria Steinem and her Ms. magazine, Germaine Greer and her Female Eunuch, Carmen Callil and her all-female publishing house Virago. And nothing was ever the same again.) Back in the ’60s I was aware that my anti-heroine might scare people off. But I did it anyway. And it was fun. After all, Cyril Connelly had advised me about my private life: “Make up your mind, you can either be a monster or a doormat.” I opted for the former.