This novel is a stunning, astringent portrayal of a very modern heroine in a classic predicament.

Rosamund Stacey, like the "New Woman" Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir write about, is Emancipated. A clever, cool, intellectual girl just out of Cambridge University, she has a self-detachment that shields her all too well from her own emotions. Her well-to-do Socialist parents have so thoroughly instilled in her the idea of dependence as a fatal sin, that Rosamund lives in a world quite isolated from reality.

It is almost casually that she loses her virginity to George, a BBC annnouncer, but there is nothing casual about the result. When it finally occurs to Rosamund that she is indeed pregnant, a determination quite foreign to her nature and inexplicable to herself strengthens her resolve to have the child.

This is an old tale told in a new way. The experiences of an unmarried mother caught up in the assembly-line indifference of the National Health system are limned in acid, but throughout pathos and near-tragedy are balanced by superbly funny incidents and great wit.

As a cogent review in the London Times Literary Supplement succintly stated, this story is "not just a tale about unmarried pregnancy ... it is rather the story of the awakening of a person, the heightening of perceptions and the softening of attitudes."

Made into the 1969 U.K. film "Thank You All Very Much".