In her concern for character and moral issues, in her incisive social satire, Penelope Lively is very much the descendant of Jane Austen and the Victorians; in her exploration of multiple points of view, the subjective aspects of time and of reality, she is heir to modernists T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. What distinguishes Lively from her literary predecessors and from many contemporary British novelists is her adroitness in blending...